What best shopping cart application to use?

Question

I am looking for a PHP based open source full featured shopping cart application which is easiest to learn and to theme....

I don't want to write my own because I'm concerned about the security and I don't really make very handy admins. Plus I have no experience with online selling and this is my first shot.

I'm thinking between Magento & ZenCart...maybe you know more...please help.

Any experienced suggestion about anything related to online selling will also be helpful...you know like a heads up...

thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with Magento but I use ZenCart and will happily tell you there is a learning curve. "Easy Themes" ??? Well, I'll qualify my agreement that Zencart is easy to theme with the addendum that there is hard work involved to customize any online shop worth running, unless you don't need anything very unique.

The best advice I can give you is to research all the packages you consider long and hard before settling on one, and especially go to sites that are actually running the package for income, not just demo sites! Zencart can hold its own against most of the for-pay wares, and I think it's the best of the free ones by far.

One serious con: A long-awaited 2.0 Beta release is showing no signs of appearing, and this is probably the single biggest current argument against going with ZenCart. The current version is great and does get pretty regular patches, but the 2.0 version is way overdue.

Answer 2

Magento is a very comprehensive solution, however it certainly is not easy to learn or has easy themes. The power and flexibility of the architecture makes it a challenge to learn, but the pay-off is huge.

One option worth considering is purchasing a commercial template for Magento. There are a number of sites selling them and you can see their approach.

If you're looking for something simple, perhaps try the WP e-Commerce plugin on top of Wordpress?

Answer 3

I hope this serves you well.

http://webtecker.com/2008/04/22/8-best-open-source-shopping-cart-solutions/

Answer 4

Zen Cart is much easier to learn and to modify than Magento. But spending a day on installing and tweaking each of them would probably be the best way to answer this questions to your satisfaction.