shopping cart software

Hi,

I am in the process of researching shopping carts. I work for a company that designs and builds PHP/MySQL websites. We are currently looking at available shopping cart software and I would like to get some comments good or bad about osCommerce which is an open source shopping cart written in PHP. Would you recommend it over commercial shopping cart software?

Any other shopping cart recommendations would also be appreciated.


Thanks for your help and advice,
Joe

I have not used osCommerce, professionally, but I've tested it and have seen some nice sites with it. Would I use it? Well that would depend on the needs of my clients, but since I built my own shopping system a while ago, I am pretty happy with it so far.

*Bangs his head on the keyboard.* I meant to AGREE with you, jgarifuna.

...I really need to quit coming here when I'm falling asleep...

I think this depends sooo much on the clients needs. I work for a shopping cart development company, so I'm biased toward our product of course.

Personally, I think some questions you might want to ask instead are:

Are you comfortable developing your own solution or letting somebody else deal with it? Oscommerce is nice in that you get access to the code and a community of programmers. It also can be an issue since not all programmers speak the same...dialect.

What is a comfortable support turn around time for you? When you deal with clients that sell 6 figures a month or more and something goes wrong (as it does with everything), your client will be motivated to get the support he/she NEEDS.

How big is the planned budget for your cart solution?

You develop solutions (mostly free solutions):
oscommerce
zen cart
cube cart
mal's ecommerce

Out of the box solutions (mostly cost based):
volusion
monster commerce
x-cart
modular merchant

I have used OSC a few times and I am getting away from it now. There is no real template system so changing the look of it takes some work. I would just find a commercial cart and stick with that. I am considering cs-cart, and sunshop right now.