advice on setting up a shopping cart

Hi

I hope this is the correct forum - it did say ecommerce. I have done a search and can't find anything on setting up a shopping cart.

Could someone recommend shopping cart software or services for setting up an ecommerce store? I require a high level of customisation, but low price..I have looked into:-
mals-e cart, lynx.net, paypal, La Garde(too ££), IMG Cart and Procart.

Thanks!
Lee

The one I've had the most amount of experience w/ is OSCommerce, which is a free, open-source e-commerce engine written in PHP/MySQL.

All you'd need to implement OSCommerce is a webserver running PHP/MySQL (which is very common), SSL certificate, and a method to conduct payment transactions (such as a PayPal account).

It meets your criteria in all aspects - inexpensive, highly customizable, in addition to being well supported and easy to maintain.

Thanks, Dr Groove! I was just looking at oscommerce when your reply came through. What a relief to finally find something and make my decision. There are so many choices out there - my brain was seizing. I am just starting to learn php and was disappointed that I would not be able to develop the cart myself sinice I am running out of time. This will however be a great way to still gain some experience with php without putting me neck on the line.

I have been onto their site and am not sure what to download.
http://www.oscommerce.com/downloads/milestones it has links to downloads and current releases (left). Just want to ensure I am downloading a working version and not test, as well as suited to the UK. Any ideas?

Thanks!
Lee

Just download & install whatever the last stable, non-development release was.

actually I hate oscommerce

we looked at it for my company and I wound up just writing an ecom package from scratch.

The thing that annoyed me is that its abstracted out so deep it takes 20 pages deep to find the variable you need to change.

its not the cleanest thing I've seen

I couldn't agree more...

I thought you were gonna thrash me for sayin that dr. lol
glad to see you see it to

I totally see it... I used OSC for a client site, and I'm still 'living with it'. The code for that site is an absolute nightmare.

have you seen any better carts out there?

I've seen other carts, but haven't had a reason to download/install/test yet. If you see one you're willing to demo, please do... and let us know what you think.

Wow. Could this site load any slower?

The real issue with this system is that its a pay per month system that is a hosted solution - not a download & install solution. Hosted solutions such as this have several inherant problems (which I'd rather not go into)... needless to say, I doubt that this is what most developers on this board are looking for (after all, we *are* developers!).

werd

yogi,

Reviewing each of your 3 posts on this forum, I've discovered that the only thing you have to offer us is advertisements for your site.

Are you actually planning on contributing something to Devshed as a community member? Or, should I just go ahead and delete your 3 commercials now, and ban you?

This is the top result on Google right now for the string "I hate osCommerce."

I typed that into Google because I too have spent hours trying to figure out what the code is even doing, let alone where the rest of its includes are or where I actually need to make changes. I'm not a l33t hacker when it comes to PHP, but I like to think I can get around pretty well. Yet all my skill is seemingly neutralized by osC.

I know I appear ungrateful for an open-source offering and I really do appreciate all the work those guys put into it; but the suffering is so great.

Thank you for letting me know that I'm not alone.