Thread

I’m looking at these two for a new site and was wondering if anyone had used them, and had anything good, bad or other to say about them?

Can you elaborate on your use case?  It really depends on that because each has its on strengths and weaknesses.

There’s some good commentary on this here: http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/186962/

CartThrob.  Brilliant Retail is quite buggy, in my experience.

I’ve used both CartThrob and Brilliant Retail on two projects recently.

Cart Throb
Pros
  - Very Flexible Addon
  - Fantastic Support, quick to respond
  - Easy to get to grips with, follows normal functionality
Cons
  - Uses EE’s flat Entries table structure, quite inefficient for large amounts of data.
Summary
  - All round great product but consider the amount of transactions that maybe put through and the size of all entries. Be prepared to make your own indexes (in exp_channel_data) if reporting on large sets of data

Brilliant Retail
Pros
  - Own table structure which is efficient
Cons
  - Very buggy
  - Quite restrictive
  - Need to use segment 2 for pagination to work. (unless you fix the issue in the code, PM if you want help)
  - No fieldtype support
  - Can only have one attribute set
  - Output code is wrapped with HTML in most instances with no option to turn this off.
  - Not all logical information outputted with tag calls.
  - No choice to redirect after action. e.g. when a users adds an item to a cart it automatically puts you to the cart URL set in the settings page. The preference from the client was to refresh the page, couldn’t be done without a code customization.
Summary
  - If you are an experienced coder (SQL and PHP) and don’t mind fixing the bugs and finding work arounds then this can be used in a professional environment. Be prepared to spend most of the time digging through the code which is actually well structured and taking a hit on upgrading if you have many customisations.

I didn’t contact BR support for my issues (more than listed above), I found the restrictions within the code so it wasn’t anything I was missing. I ended up writing endless lines of SQL code to get what I needed from BR. With CT I did need help with a Paypal integration although the answer was in the documentation the maze of pages never led me to the answer. Response was quick but as a development company strict on efficiency the reuse of the entries tables didn’t sit well.

Should we take on another ecommerce project, we’ll be sure to save a load of time and use CartThrob.

Anyone having issues with Brilliant Retail, we’d be more than happy to share our workarounds.

Thanks

Tim
EEvolution.co.uk