As both a Web Developer and Designer I’m always on the lookout to see ‘What’s New’ in the world of Open Source Shopping Carts, I’ve used a large selection each having their own advantages and disadvantages and more importantly each cart i have been used has been specifically selected depending on my Clients needs. This has caused a few headaches because it means every time I get a new E-Commerce project i have to identify the Clients needs and compare all of the latest Shopping Carts to see which one will do the job that is required.

Some of the more popular Shopping Carts I’ve used in development are:

  • Magento
  • osCommerce
  • Zen Cart

Magento

Magento is a brilliant Shopping Cart in it’s own ways, The Admin Panel for example can be both incredible and awful at the same time. It’s too complex for its own good, although it has an endless amount of features it makes things far more complicated than it ever needs to be. As a result it pretty much requires its own dedicated server just to run it! A far too bloated Shopping Cart that i would only ever use again for a large scale business that has a big enough budget!

osCommerce

osCommerce was one of the first Shopping Cart systems i used, I learnt how it works inside and out which meant it was very flexible and allowing me to fulfil any requirements a client may have. However it is now quite old and out-dated and the code is really poor to work with, there is no logical structure and making simple edits can be a real pain.

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is osCommerce’s younger, better looking brother. It has solved alot of problems osCommerce has and even has an MVC Code structure which make it much easier to work with my separating views from application logic and database interaction. However out of the box it is no better looking than osCommerce and the Admin Panel is no improvement.

Enter…OpenCart

OpenCart, the light at the end of a very long tunnel. Open Cart is the perfect solution to all the Shopping Cart problems we usually encounter.It is an open source shopping cart written in PHP that is getting more popular by the day. It has a very graceful MVC Code Structure that makes it just brilliant to work with and out of the box both the Front end and Back end systems are both elegant and subtle. Read the rest…