Guest Posted January 18, 2007 Share Posted January 18, 2007 I was just hoping for some honest opinions on Cube Cart. I've spend, literally hundreds of hours in my time off over Christmas building a Zen Cart site and making it work. I've got it 95% done but have stumbled at the last phase and I'm so sick of the damn thing I'm considering trying another cart before I employ a coder to make Zen Cart work. I'm going to be selling tangible goods, I'm VAT registered and I'm in the UK. I like lots of options when to comes to setup and customising and I wish to use Paypal Website payments Pro. I was as much as possible to me automated as I'm expecting 40-50 orders daily within 12 months. I think after my troubles with Zen Cart I'd like to know how UK friendly Cube Cart is. I like Zen, it's fetaures are great, but I spends hours setting up UK dates, taxes, shipping zones, etc etc. Are the 2 products similar in features, and will Cube Cart give me a proper VAT invoice to UK Standards, while showing the VAT inclusive price in the catalog? (this was the stumbling point with Zen) Thanks for reading my questions, I'm feeling very down about the whole cart thing and would love Cube Cart to come to the rescue, but I don't want to start the whole process again to find it as difficult as Zen. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 18, 2007 Share Posted January 18, 2007 You'll get your best answers from installing CubeCart and giving it a test run. Overall, CubeCart is built for simplicity rather than including every known feature possible. If you like to have lots of choices, then CubeCart may not be for you. On the other hand, there are many mods available that add features to CubeCart. Browse the CubeCart.org site to find many of them and links to modder's websites. At one time, I also gave ZenCart a try, as well as osCommerce, X-Cart, SunShop, and a few others as well. There is a lot of talk about a newer cart called CS-Cart that is very similar to X-Cart, but with some significant differences. It is my feeling that no matter which cart you go with, you'll end up spending either time or money to get it working the way you want it. After spending well over $1000 on various carts and several hundreds of hours between them, I settled on CubeCart because it's solid, well structured, and has a good community around it. It may not be for you, however. You have to access your needs and your wants and figure out what are the "make it or break it" features that are your absolute minimum requirements. From there, you can evaluate each cart you look at in those terms, as well as what extra features they offer. As you've found with your ZenCart experience, sometimes an important feature is the flexibility to change things and the ease of making those changes. That's where CubeCart's community really shines. There are many coders who are willing to offer their help, and when a project is bigger, their rates are reasonable, usually because they see the possibility of selling their work as a mod to many others, so development costs are usually distributed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
roban Posted January 18, 2007 Share Posted January 18, 2007 What the heck! It's free! What's to think about. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Sibby Posted January 20, 2007 Share Posted January 20, 2007 What the heck! It's free! What's to think about. You should notice that is two (and now three) customers stating what it is like ^^ To be honest, I am disappointed in many ways but I had the chance to learn about carts. My disappointments were some small things like shipping say N/A on the first page of the checkout then it shows on the next, then their were larger things like IPN redirect didn't work despire all I tried. Support was useless for the PayPal IPN and useless in an emergency I just had so I would not rely on that (or pay for anymore on top of what you get for paying for CC). My only answers were doing forum searches and doing trial and error. To begin with it is ok, specially if you are a one man band and want a quick low price set up. If you are VAT registered it must mean you have some high income coming in, I would got for the proper thing and have a custom made one. This is my opinion, of course. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 20, 2007 Share Posted January 20, 2007 If you are VAT registered it must mean you have some high income coming in Any business can voluntary become VAT registered. If you bring in over £61,000 in 12 months then you must become VAT registered - if below, then you can do it voluntary. See here for more info. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ULTRAZ-UK Posted January 21, 2007 Share Posted January 21, 2007 I am in the UK too but use it to sell digital products [ebooks software etc] and have experienced no problems at all with it. I suppose it goes down to what your experience in coding is like? I have had no problems with the setting up/auto delivering of items, but I have had to spent quite a while learning about the template system.....unfortunately I think no matter what cart you decide to purchase, you will eventually have to mod yourself. but is that not a good thing? The last thing your customer wants to see is hundreds of websites all the same :0) The only complaint I have about this is not enough customer stat options and unable to email customers individually [unless I have overlooked that?] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 21, 2007 Share Posted January 21, 2007 The only complaint I have about this is not enough customer stat options and unable to email customers individually [unless I have overlooked that?] What sort of customer stats would you like? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 24, 2007 Share Posted January 24, 2007 You're asking if it's UK friendly....I'd say YES, since it's author lives in the UK. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ULTRAZ-UK Posted January 25, 2007 Share Posted January 25, 2007 @ subten. The more stats you can get the better when it comes to learning about your customers. I am not bothered about what search terms they used to find my website, or what search engine they come from... but I have tried all the popular carts and CC is pretty poor compared to the others when it comes to feedback stats. I "think" it was xCart Gold I tried which had great stats which you could plan a marketing campaign around because the stats were so detailed. @ Sir William, I agree that it is definately UK friendly compared to the others, but what made me stick with CC was the ease of setting it up to accept orders for downloadable products. I think that the other cart coders tend to put the needs of the downloadable/instant delivery market near the bottom of the list of priorities when doing any upgrading. There are a few things that I would like to see added/changed, like a plug in which would cater for ebay sales/auto delivery, email customers single as well as bulk, email IPN acceptance system changed so it did not swallow up the single email address that Paypal allows for instant delivery...that is a problem to me as I do a lot of marketing and need the IPN to be flexible due to the other systems I may be using on a campaign. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 25, 2007 Share Posted January 25, 2007 Yes, the download products option was what sealed it for me and CubeCart. The store I am working on will be 100% downloadable to begin with. As for stats, yes the basics are poor but there is a modification providing more detailed product statistics. In addition, you could set up Google Analytics on your site. Lots of info! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest ULTRAZ-UK Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 I search for mods nearly every second day...never find any decent ones though. But I have been a bit loose over the last few weeks as I am doing an upgrade on all the other parts of my website, plus adding a few new sections like a new members area, help desk, link exchange, forum and a fully detailed SEO report and upgrade ! ! I have been looking at the CS Cart tonight [just out of curiousity] and there are some good features which would be great if they were added to CC... Displayable news section, built in Article directory, built in Affiliate programme, switchable html template option [good for SE's], ebay payments compatible, great customer stats showing visitors on site, what they are looking at, now many have been on site over 6 hours, 12 hours, 1 Day, 3 Days, 7 Days etc.. TBH the feature list that I would add to my shop is never ending lol :0) Suppose I could go and D/L a trial and pull the code to bits and try to add some to my website :0) lol Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 There are 3 news mods, I understand there are affiliate programmes (not sure never use them myself), there is a free SEO mod that will give search engine friendly URLs. I do like the idea customer stats tracking where they visit, etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest jr1966 Posted February 11, 2007 Share Posted February 11, 2007 Hi all, I purchased a copy of cubecart in nov 2006 and so far have added about 20 or so mods to it ,I haven’t finished my store and have put it on hold until cubecart comes up with some more basic content. Negatives, the options just don’t work for me at all they are really difficult to get your head around and you cannot add a text field option. The shipping is also complex and I don’t think it is user friendly if you want to sell uk.EU,ROW The vat is not very good either if you sell to EU countries ROW as well as UK You have to register to order from cubecart which is a big put of for most people. Positives, The forums are good and some of the mods are very good, but there is not enough coders in my opinion. There are some good templates about And I think this software will be one of the best around after the next big update. I don’t want to be over critical because I’m sure things are going in the right direction if a little slow. Please don’t come back at me criticising what I have said because this is my opinion not yours. Regards john Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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