Free Shopping Cart Reviews
Are you looking for a some free shopping cart software? Instant-e-Store.com have reviewed a few of the major players in both the free & paid shopping cart software arena.
Do you need a shopping cart? Maybe you already have an online shopfront but would like something with more features, better security & easier to maintain? Give our Basic or Professional Instant-e-Store a try. You can even get it installed and completely customized to your liking.
osCommerce Shopping Cart Review
Pros –
I found Oscommerce to be pretty easy to setup. Of course you can install Oscommerce from the Fantastico cpanel on your website which will make it quicker to install. There are heaps of free plug ins and because this software is community based and open source you have heaps of people working on this 24/7 behind the scenes. It is a great free based software really it has a lot of features you have a lot of control from your admin panel and your customers orders can be dealt with quickly and easily.
Cons –
One of the main things the bugs me about commerce is how hard it is to do basic formatting and getting the design that you really like, although they improving your control over design. Knowledge of PHP is very much needed if you want to change features with this software. Also I found security in regards to credit card processing very hard to configure. Also I found that when I wanted to change things in the admin panel it sometimes messed up the order process for the customer. The uploading of multiply products became a disaster also for me. The more products I uploaded the more issues I had.
Features -
Although osCommerce is still in its development stage, the available Milestone releases are considered to be stable with the following features:
General Functionality
- Compatible with all PHP 4 versions
- All features enabled by default for a complete out-of-the-box solution
- Object oriented backend (MS3)
- Completely multilingual with English, German, and Spanish provided by default
Setup / Installation
- Automatic web-browser based installation and upgrade procedure
Design / Layout
- Template structure implementation to:
- allow layout changes to be adaptive, easy, and quickly to make (MS3)
- allow easy integration into an existing site (MS3)
- Support for dynamic images
Administration / Backend Functionality
- Supports unlimited products and categories
- Products-to-categories structure
- Categories-to-categories structure
- Add/Edit/Remove categories, products, manufacturers, customers, and reviews
- Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
- Administration area secured with a username and password defined during installation (MS3)
- Contact customers directly via email or newsletters
- Easily backup and restore the database
- Print invoices and packaging lists from the order screen
- Statistics for products and customers
- Multilingual support
- Multicurrency support
- Automatically update currency exchange rates
- Select what to display, and in what order, in the product listing page
- Support for static and dynamic banners with full statistics
Customer / Frontend Functionality
- All orders stored in the database for fast and efficient retrieval
- Customers can view their order history and order statuses
- Customers can maintain their accounts
- Addressbook for multiple shipping and billing addresses
- Temporary shopping cart for guests and permanent shopping cart for customers
- Fast and friendly quick search and advanced search features
- Product reviews for an interactive shopping experience
- Foreseen checkout procedure
- Secure transactions with SSL
- Number of products in each category can be shown or hidden
- Global and per-category bestseller lists
- Display what other customers have ordered with the current product shown
- Breadcrumb trail for easy site navigation
Product Functionality
- Dynamic product attributes relationship
- HTML based product descriptions
- Automated display of specials
- Control if out of stock products can still be shown and are available for purchase
- Customers can subscribe to products to receive related emails/newsletters
Payment Functionality
- Accept numerous offline payment processing (cheque, money orders, offline credit care processing, ..)
- Accept numerous online payment processing (2CheckOut, PayPal, Authorize.net, iPayment, ..)
- Disable certain payment services based on a zone basis
Shipping Functionality
- Weight, price, and destination based shipping modules
- Real-time quotes available (UPS, USPS, FedEx, ..)
- Free shipping based on amount and destination
- Disable certain shipping services based on a zone basis
Tax Functionality
- Flexible tax implementation on a state and country basis
- Set different tax rates for different products
- Charge tax on shipping on a per shipping service basis
Overall Experience –
Well I found that Oscommerce outgrew my business and it got to the point that I spent more time fixing the code and admin panel than I did taking orders which was bad for my business as I wasn't spending time doing what I really need to to expand my business. I than went to Zen Cart which you can read about next.