Shopping Carts?

Anyone with knowledge of shopping carts:

I'm looking for a shopping cart to implement for a client that currently is using the Yahoo solution.

I have these solutions available to me via my webhost: CubeCart, OS Commerce, Zen Cart, Agora. Obviously I am open to others - I'm hoping to find an easy to install, fairly well supported, customizable (looks-wise) shopping cart.

Thanks for any feedback.

Look around here: http://hotscripts.net/PHP/Scripts_and_Programs/E-Commerce/Shopping_Carts/index.html

OS Commerce is the best option in my opinion... you can customize down the line to accommodate features you need as well.

I'd also second the osCommerce option. In terms of features and back end monitoring/ administration etc it's excellent. However, it's got it's on design and takes some customisation.

I am interested in any of the other shopping carts you have mentioned above. However what I need is a shopping cart that can be plugged into (seemlessly) an existing site. I have already deigned the site in Dreamweaver and would simply like to add "Add to Cart" buttons to the site and the shopping cart facility and then integrate with a payment gateway. The main requirement is that I keep my current site design/colours/layout/branding etc.

Can anyone recommend a shopping cart that suit my needs?

Regards, J - all help greatly appreciated.

Yeah - I don't want something that I can't customize because the site design is pretty much done - I need something that can be integrated into it.

im looking for something like that too ... could anyone help us? pls.

I looked into into osCommerce and Zen Cart and found them difficult to integrate into an existing site. The architecture seemed like it could use some work.

Instead, I found a commercial product, litecommerce (made by the same people as x-cart), which is both easy to set up and yet fully customizable. It has a 'checkout' desk mode which will allow the cart to just be a cart, and they provide you with HTML to link it into your existing website. Unfortunately a small component is encoded with ioncube for copy protection, but the architecture is such that it's pretty easy to figure out what's going on, and you can modify all the code that really matters.

The HTML is very 1998, but it's all in the theme folder using Flexy templates so you can fully update the design. The files are extensive, so a full update would take some time, but its not too hard to figure out what is what.

Litecommerce costs $99 per license (some modules cost extra) which allows you to run it only on one domain. I set up my /etc/hosts file to link that domain to my local box so I could do development locally, then take the entry out and upload the live site... works like a charm.

thanks for adding your experiences jiblet. litecommerce from the same people that do x-cart is one option that i found when i done a load of research into shopping carts a while back. seemed capable of good customisation to suit an existing design.

last question... does it still work off a template though (i seem to remem that they had loads of templates) that is easily customised - or is it a bit like paypal's shopping cart (where you simply copy n paste html)?

cheers again, jamie

It's kind of the best of both worlds. In the admin tool they give you HTML links / buttons to add items to your cart.

As far as I can tell, all the HTML output of the engine goes through a large series of Flexy templates in the skins directory. They are separated by admin / public, so you can even modify that admin back end. In the public folder there are just over 100 template files, most of them very short (<5 lines). They use light Flexy logic to generalize some of the templates for multiple situations, but its easy to get in and hack the html. Sometimes it takes a minute to find out which templates you want to modify, or sometimes modifications to a template extend farther than you would like, but overall the structure is well-engineered (even if the HTML is not).

I'm not at all familiar with Flexy templates - could I just rip all the functionality out and place it in my CSS based design and be done?

I was not familiar with Flexy templates either, but I'm actually a lot more interested in them now. The functionality is very easy to understand, and much simpler than Smarty templates (which, incidentally, I think are rarely any better than just writing your templates in PHP proper).

As long as you pay attention to what you are doing, its pretty easy to convert the templates to a more standards-based approach. You just have to be aware of IF and FOREACH attributes that you may have to transplant into your new HTML. As much as I hate ColdFusion and the idea of a HTML-like template logic, I have to admit that those attributes are very intuitive and make the template much more concise.

If you are well-versed in HTML you should be able to identify what is NOT html and hence is probably a Flexy attribute, tag, or variable. I would expect to spend at least a couple hours to get through all the templates.