# Building a shopping cart



## screature (May 14, 2007)

Anyone here with shopping cart building experience?

It is an area area of web dev that I have very little experience with and for the first time I have a client that requires it. I have developed a shopping cart for them using Godaddy's Quick Cart functionality, but it isn't as robust as I would like it... i.e. it isn't as customizable as I would like it to be in terms of look and feel to match the rest of the site.

I have searched and can't find any Mac friendly applications that make it fast and easy... it seems that there are more alternatives in the Windows world (e.g. Coffee Cup) to do this.

What do people here use? It isn't worth my time or her money to learn and buy expensive software to accomplish this as her requirements are quite basic in terms of the number of products offered.

Any suggestions would be welcome.  Thanks in advance.


----------



## Ottawaman (Jan 16, 2005)

OpenCart - Open Source Shopping Cart Solution

Shopping Cart Software & E-commerce Hosting Solutions


----------



## FeXL (Jan 2, 2004)

Ran across this today on POTN. Don't know anything about it except the guy who endorsed it said it was a nice cart & he had it on his photography website to book sessions.


----------



## yamawho (Jan 10, 2010)

Had an online store about three years ago and used OS Commerce ...

osCommerce, Open Source Online Shop E-Commerce Solutions

osCommerce - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Free app, we had it running accepting credit cards using PayPal and was able to transfer funds from there to a bank account.


----------



## kps (May 4, 2003)

Don't know where you're hosting your client, but my host provides 'Fantastico DeLuxe' and part of that is the inclusion of 3 shopping carts which I have available to me for free. Fantastico will perform the installation, creation of an SQL database, etc. with a single click. You add the content and whatever custom development is necessary.

Part of my hosting plan is the aforementioned 'OS Commerce' (nominated by someone who actually used it ) and these two:

CubeCart - Free & Commercial Online Shopping Cart Solutions
*
ecommerce shopping cart software by Zen Cart ecommerce solution

On cursory examination, all three seem capable of doing what will suit your client's modest requirements.

What do you mean by 'Mac friendly'? Most of these run on web servers (usually Linux) and require MySQL. They may have versions for Windows servers, but I would think you'd be more comfortable with the Linux versions. All administrative tasks are performed through a browser interface. Any custom web development, would be straight HTML, CSS, XML and other standard web protocols and/or scripting languages.


----------



## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

oSCommerce, cubecart, Megento, and x-cart.

I've used all 4, they all work and are quite customizable, depending on how deep you like getting into things like smarty code etc.


----------



## screature (May 14, 2007)

Thanks guys. I will check into these suggestions... much appreciated.


----------



## Guest (Nov 22, 2010)

OsCommerce and Zencart are two that I've done the most work with.

kps: be very careful using hose Fantastico based installs ... they are typically way behind on security updates and not very well supported. They are a huge target for spammers/scammers to take advantage of due to that fact. I just cleaned up after a system compromise that was enabled due to a fantastico install of OsCommerce that was pretty horrific -- think thousands of pages of spam related content, several remote shells, IRCbots, etc injected into their website without them knowing. The only reason they finally clued into it was that their server felt slow and they went way over their bandwidth cap. Costly mistake on all fronts for them.

If you're going to use one of those open source/free carts do it from the actual source code and stay on top of security updates yourself.


----------



## kps (May 4, 2003)

mguertin, thanks for the tip in Fantastico installs, but I've also received update notifications on installed web apps. Are you saying that even those are out of date or is it that perhaps your client ignored the update notices.


----------



## Guest (Nov 23, 2010)

kps said:


> mguertin, thanks for the tip in Fantastico installs, but I've also received update notifications on installed web apps. Are you saying that even those are out of date or is it that perhaps your client ignored the update notices.


The updates they push can be quite out of date at times, they have to patch them (to match up with all the automatic config options they put in them), test them, etc. Also depending on the hosting server/company you may et very infrequent updates of the Fantastico installs ... they are not always updated nightly (like the cPanel updates, etc). I think the default on the couple of hosting servers I have is that Fantastico only updates every couple of weeks. I've seen it take 2 months for critical security updates to arrive. I've also seen hosting setups that never update the Fantastico installs.

Moral of the story ... if you're going to use them also keep tabs on the project itself to make sure you're not lagging very far behind critical security updates.


----------



## kps (May 4, 2003)

Are you saying it may be difficult to patch a Fantastico install with an update downloaded from the project site itself? That doesn't sound good.


----------



## groovetube (Jan 2, 2003)

regardless of whether you installed from source or fantastico, you can easily go to the update page inside admin and it will notify you of a newer wordpress version. If there are any updates, you'll see a number on the updates item in the admin menu.


----------



## kps (May 4, 2003)

Well, since you've mentioned Wordpress...that is the only Fantastico install I have. Haven't had any security issues, but then I did update several times and have plugins like Akismet installed.


----------



## Guest (Nov 24, 2010)

Yep if you stay on top of the updates you're ok ... my main warning is that thee big open source projects, especially popular ones like osCommerce and Wordpress are not "set and forget" types of installations, even with Fantastico.


----------



## ScanMan (Sep 11, 2007)

mental_floss Blog A Brief History?and Future?of the Shopping Cart


----------

