Any recommendations for shopping cart software?

ajf

ajf

Soldato
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Worcestershire, UK
Can anyone recommend a free or cheap package to build a small online shop?
Must be able to handle stock control and payments such as Paypal.

Thanks
Andrew
 
Many thanks for the two suggestions.
Have had a quick look at both but will give them both a better try soon.
opencart on first glance seems to be more for me as it looks simpler to set up. I can manage basic html but some of the php etc in oscommerce had me scratching my head a bit!
Does opencart rely heavily on that too or is more 'user friendly' for a beginner.

I also noticed they both use mysql which my current isp package does not have. Someone suggested I could use an access database or even a small oracle database instead. Would that work?

Thanks
Andrew
 
I used oscommerce a while ago for a shop very good but was abit of a pain in places.

What i did use later to very good succes and think is a lot better is Joomla with a shopping cart ad on. This allows for your site to have more content for other sides of the shop.

Heres a Joomla site i designed a while back and now is maintained by another person http://www.tewktech.com/
 
I also noticed they both use mysql which my current isp package does not have. Someone suggested I could use an access database or even a small oracle database instead. Would that work?
Are you going to host your store with your ISP?

I would get dedicated hosting from Vidahost or TSOhost. It's cheap and will include MySQL, which you will definitely want. These two providers are the ones worth considering and you can't go wrong with either.
 
Are you going to host your store with your ISP?

I would get dedicated hosting from Vidahost or TSOhost. It's cheap and will include MySQL, which you will definitely want. These two providers are the ones worth considering and you can't go wrong with either.

I actually use 1and1 to host my site, it's just that my current hosting package does not have mysql. It is available on a higher package but I wanted to try it out before I commit to spending the extra if I can.
 
You can try it on your local PC using WAMP or XAMPP to install everything you need.

OpenCart is programmed better than osCommerce but has a smaller community.
 
Thank you again.
I have installed WAMP and Opencart and currently looking at how to configure it. It looks good so hopefully will work for me.

Andrew
 
Prestashop - very customizable with many many free/paid modules. Over at their forums you can pay people to design and customize your template and the support is excellent. If you want SSL you will need a dedicated IP and a certificate too to gain trust from customers.

Here is a demo of one I just did for an angling store, still working on it so no c&c please - http://shop.hl-ac.co.uk/
 
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Prestashop - very customizable with many many free/paid modules. Over at their forums you can pay people to design and customize your template and the support is excellent. If you want SSL you will need a dedicated IP and a certificate too to gain trust from customers.

Here is a demo of one I just did for an angling store, still working on it so no c&c please - http://shop.hl-ac.co.uk/

That looks nothing like PrestaShop (which is good) I hate the standard look of PrestaShop. So what you have done to it is great :)
 
That looks nothing like PrestaShop (which is good) I hate the standard look of PrestaShop. So what you have done to it is great :)

For free its good, what more can someone expect other than a basic template. Yep, it doesn't even look like a shop until you enter the categories. I am just testing it at the moment then going to move it to a dedicated server with SSL.
 
another vote for opencart. tested it and really liked it. only issue was it became obvious fairly quickly that it was still new but i tried it about a year ago now so i'm sure it's come along way since then
 
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