Thread

This is totally unrelated to EE. I have a client that I just finished a static site for. They are a seafood restaurant that wants to sell some packages of fresh seafood online. zen cart, cube cart and the other heavy hitters seem to be overkill for this situation. They might have 3-4 items. And keep in mind that they are not currently using EE so to pay 250$ just to gain access to the simple commerce is not really in their best interest. Do you know of any other scripts that you would suggest? They probably wont even care whether it has a shopping cart or not. And I have even kicked around the idea of putting a couple of buttons from paypal up there and leaving it at that. Just want to make sure that I am heading in the right direction.

M.

anyone…. anyone….

OK so how bout this. Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about the following shopping carts?

Zencart
Cubecart
osCommerce
xCart
Lite Commerce

Let’s start there. I would imagine there are a lot of people out there that would like to know the advantages and disadvantages of particular systems.

M.

Perhaps http://www.phpcart.net/ might work for you, it’s basically a checkout scriopt, you simply place purchase links with your products and it will handle the ordering.

Personally I have rarely used OSC or Zencart as my customers find them horrendously complicated to use, plus OSC is a nightmare to design for - ie, templates and code all mixed up.

Cubecart is a basic cart script but tremendously powerful with a few addons. If you cut out all the unwanted extras like featured/recent products, newsletter signup box etc it will work for what you need. As a bonus all Cubecart templates are CSS based making customisation a doddle.

X-cart - don’t even go there if you like to design sematic accessible sites. It’s template are a mire of embedded tables and depreciated tags, it uses Smarty for templating but is very messy. X-cart has a ton of features and addons though.

LiteCommerce is not bad, though you’ll never get the outputted html to validate because it uses several non-standard tags. LC does have it’s quirks like getting shipping to work properly but if you’re looking for a quick cheap solution you could do worse.

For 3-4 products you don’t really need an all singing-all dancing cart script, just a method of taking orders and payment, have a look at phpcart! Cubecart is worth a look and would give your user the ability to update product descriptions/prices etc themselves.

BlueDreamer, Thanks very much for your post. That is exactly what I needed. I will take a look at php cart today.

Anyone else want to weigh in? Last time I checked at shopping-cart-reviews.com there were 50 or more scripts for shopping carts. How do the rest of you handle this request with your clients?

M.

Marcus, did you happen to look at my thread here?

No I had not seen that. Thanks for the link. I was trying to keep it simple for them. Click Cart Pro seems like a good solution though. The 199$ price tag is close enough to EE that I would be tempted to just buy them EE for the simple commerce moule.

Last time I checked at shopping-cart-reviews.com there were 50 or more scripts for shopping carts. How do the rest of you handle this request with your clients?

No problem…

If I have a client wanting ecommerce I get as much information from them about exactly what they want, meaning in terms of script features, budget and long term plans - ie they might not want the ability to show “Bestsellers” now but might in the future. I gather all this information together and see which cart system is the closest match “off the shelf”, or the one that can be easily adapted without too many mods. I have a pretty full arsenal of different premade scripts I can call on for just about any sort of site and this generally covers every need, of course EE is in there for when it’s the best tool for the job!

Naturally I make it clear to clients that if a particular function isn’t included in a script and they want it later on they will have to pay for a mod, or upgrade to something better - cover all bases!

I did use Clickcartpro some time ago, it’s improved no end since then and as Stephen says worth a look.

For a really simple shopping cart solution, check out Shopify.  I haven’t used it myself but have been investigating it for some local retail stores that want to dip their toes into selling online.