Shopping for Shopping Carts

Over at PC Mechanic, I have been, for some time, running an online store which I programmed myself. That store was functional and it served well for some time. Being that I custom-coded the whole thing, I could also make everything work exactly how I wanted it. This was nice. However, the store had a lot of limitations that other pre-packaged solutions already took care of. I could expand the store to do all those things, but it would have taken me quite some time. I’m a busy guy and I don’t like re-inventing the wheel. So, I decided to take the plunge and switch store platforms, moving from my familiar but moody custom store solution to something pre-programmed and supported.

My criteria for the store was:

• Must be PHP/MySQL based
• Must have the features one would expect of a shopping cart platform
• Must be template based so that I can change the layout without modifying the source code

I played around with a few different titles that are on the market. Let me run through the ones I have worked with and give you my impression of them.

• OSCommerce (www.oscommerce.com). This is a very well known (and free) package and it is indeed very powerful. However, the current version (as of this writing) is Milestone 2.2 and that version does not use a template system. This means all of the design elements are meshed in with the PHP code. This is annoying considering just how prevalent template systems are today. This means that, on a package this size, you need to essentially be an expert on OSCommerce to do any effective hacking. There is an industry of OSCommerce developers on the internet offering customization and templates, and my view is that all of this is due simply to the fact that the system is overly complicated and not template based. So, while the price tag (free) was attractive, I would have had to sink a bunch of money to hire a developer to make the store look like I want. MS3 is apparently being designed to use a template system, but there is no telling what that will be available (probably not anytime soon).
• Cubecart (www.cubecart.com). I have worked with this cart in the past. It is free, but you need to pay a license fee to remove the copyright notice. It is template based and the templates are pretty easy to work with. Essentially you have “skins” in the server file system and you can just modify those skins and re-upload. The store also contains all the features that one would usually need in a cart. The main reason I did not go with this store for my own store was because it was not quite as community-supported as some others. And when I used this software for a client’s site, I had to go into the code and fix a few issues with it myself.
• LiteCommerce (www.litecommerce.com). This is a nice platform offered by the same folks who do X-Cart. It is aimed specifically at people who want something easy. The template system is nice, too, because everything is editable in any WYSIWYG editor such as Dreamweaver. One issue, though, is that many of the features standard in other shopping carts require additional (commercial) add-ons in Litecommerce. For example, integrating with almost any payment gateway requires a $15 add-on. It also does not offer real time shipping quotes with UPS or Fedex. It cannot handle digital (downloadable) goods without yet another add-on. So, I really liked LiteCommerce, however when I compared costs with X-Cart, considering what I needed, it really was not a cheaper option for me.
• CSCart (www.cscart.com). I bought a license to this one and may indeed use it at some point. The interface is very clean and it contains most every feature I needed. At the time, though, I was using Authorize.Net SIM for payment processor, which this cart did not support. It worked with Authorize.Net AIM (which I am now using), however. The software is not as heavily supported as OSCommerce or X-Cart by the community.

There are a lot of other titles out there, but I specifically went for the more popular options because the whole point of my store conversion was to get something that had heavy support, both from the developers and the user community.

Ultimately, I went with X-Cart (www.x-cart.com). X-Cart is developed by some folks in Russia and they are the same people who developed LiteCommerce (and I heard from somewhere they also developed CSCart, although I have not attempted to verify that). The features of the software were about what you would expect from a shopping cart, so I won’t bore you with the feature list. But, let me address the main reasons I chose X-Cart over the others:

• Heavily supported. The developers offer web-based support for their software and there is also a wide user base that is active in the forums. There are also companies out there who design add-ons for X-Cart (most of them commercial). So, all of this went to show me that a lot of people used X-Cart and there was thus a source of help if I had problems with it. I should note that the X-Cart guys use a point system for the web support, so you need to buy points to get support. You do get points when you purchase X-cart which should take care of all of your needs, however if you do run out of support points you will need to purchase more in order to get them to help you. I have not used their support service on this go-around, but I can say that I setup X-Cart many years ago for a client and I actually had one of their guys working on my problem (integration with Bank of America payment gateway) personally and chatting with me in ICQ. Being that they were in Russia, I had to stay up late to wait for them to get to work in the morning, but I still admired their effort.
• Lot of “Out of Box” functionality. I wanted plug-and-play integration with my payment processor, real time shipping quotes for UPS, ability to offer downloadable goods, etc. X-Cart did all this out of the box. In fact, X-cart integrates with processors and shippers I never even heard of. So, they’ve done a good job of making a fully functional store. I was seriously considering their LiteCommerce package, but I actually did a price comparison of the two and it would have been more expensive (by a bit) to purchase LiteCommerce with the add-ons I needed than to purchase X-Cart.
• Template-based. X-Cart is based on the Smarty template system. Now, I have my gripes with this, but at least it was template based meaning I did not have to modify source code (and hence worry about version control for future upgrades) in order to do something as simple as insert my logo.

Now that I have X-Cart up and running on PCMech’s store, I do have some gripes about the product. I am NOT unhappy with my choice, but every product has its pitfalls. I have not yet found the perfect software for every requirement of mine, short of doing it myself.

• Use of Smarty. X-cart is template based as I said above, but it uses Smarty as the template system. I really dislike Smarty because it completely defeats the point of a template system. To me, any good template system should almost completely separate programming and design, logic from presentation. Smarty is so interlaced with logic and Smarty syntax that the templates are barely readable as HTML. For that reason, it is a MAJOR pain in the arse to modify the look and feel of X-cart yourself without becoming pretty fluent with Smarty. I would NEVER use Smarty in one of my projects for this very reason, and it is disappointing that X-cart uses it. From the programming side of things (and I am a programmer) I can understand Smarty’s appeal, but its difficult for the end user. Long story short, I ended up purchasing as prefabricated template for X-cart and installed it and modified only a few quick things to my liking. If I had to integrate the entire PCMech.com layout into X-cart, it would have taken me forever.
• Customers/Orders not easily accessed. There is no easy way to simply get a listing of customers or orders. Going to view either gives you a search form. In order to list all, you literally have to search for nothing, and THEN it will give you a list of your orders. It would be so easy for the X-cart folks to simply put a search form on top of a listing of users or orders, but they don’t.
• No link between customers and orders. X-cart stores customer contact information along with the order itself, so the fact that that user also has a profile is really lost on X-cart. A simple way to link an order to the user profile (and adversely to link from a user profile to all of their orders) would be such a simple thing and once again I have no idea why X-cart doesn’t do it.
• No Sales Stats. The statistics area offers no sales statistics. The only sales statistics are provided on the main page after you log in, and they are not useful to me. I need to be able to enter date ranges and get sales figures. Lack of this feature meant I had to program my own script to perform this simple function.

Perhaps I can get the X-cart folks to address these simple things. I don’t, however, expect them to make a switch from Smarty as that would entail a complete re-write of X-cart.

In short, X-Cart is a powerful shopping cart platform and I invite anyone to check it out if they are needing something of that caliber. Depending on your requirements, a solution like LiteCommerce may be a simpler way to go. CSCart is also a powerful solution which offers readable templates. X-cart, though, is just about as heavily supported and discussed as OSCommerce. This means there is a lot of help out there when you need it. As usual when dealing with software like this, its a tradeoff.

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