Difference between carts (Zen,CubeCart,OsCommerce)

[Guest nomi737]

Hi all !!!

Can any one guide me about

1- Zen Cart

2- Cube Cart

3- OsCommerce

What are the differences between all of the above?

Which one to use and where ??

Please help me out.

Thanx in advance

Nouman Ali Marwat

[Guest]

My non-technical answer to your questions are:

Zen Cart is similar to OsCommerce but it is a little easier to use but still complicated.

OsCommerce is takes too long to configure and after you get it configured it still doesn't do what you want it to do without major tweaking. If you want to customize it, you have to edit the program files and risk messing something up so the cart doesn't work properly. It would be so much easier if they had templates to customize the design. It is such a pain in the ass to work with, which is probably why most OsCommerce sites look the same. The navigation in the admin area is so cluttered that it so hard to find what you are looking for.

Cube Cart simplifies a lot of things and is way easier to setup and customize. Templates make it easy to customize. There is an HTML editor in the admin section.

Cube Cart for sure would be my first choice, then Zen Cart in an emergency. Oscommerce is not an option for me after much time spent trying to use it. I mean it works, but there are other carts that are way better.

[roban]

Just to add one comment to what vkitty said: Join OSCommerce support site. One day there and you'll come running back to CC.

[Guest gul]

i m agree with "vkitty" ..

Cubecart is really BEST shopping cart system...

Good work Brooky :P

[Guest]

I can give you the technical difference that caused me to switch from OSC and Zen (which are still very much the same) is that an average cart with say 20-30 items that you sell will yeild anywhere from 300-1000 queries per page load which is just staggering. I've tried to make the case that this alone should be their top priority, but it has always fallen on deaf ears because they thing the page load times are still good.

OSC/Zen are terribly slow and just poorly designed.

[Guest GnomeyNewt]

I also started with OSC and than looked for a better solution since its templating system was crazy and it didn't look like it would be fun to mod. Even the free mods look very daunting to add. Anyhow, I stumbled across many free and paid carts. I liked x-cart and the sun shoppe a lot, but I soon came across zen-cart whose orginal code is from OSC. It had the option to upload a file per product which I needed and infact had not seen in any of the other free or paid carts. After using it for about 2 weeks, I saw first hand how hard it was to configure ... 20+ menus just to configure it! Anyhow the developers are not very friendly from what I saw on the boards and like somebody else brought up it has SOOOOOO many page queries it was not worth it if you plan to have a lot of products. In the end I discovered cubecart and I have to say its been great getting to know it! So far its been easy to customize template wise and changing/modding the code. I just dove right in, there was no headache at all.

I think here at the cubecart.com forums you will get most of us liking the cube the best :c).

[Guest vrakas]

Zen cart is way to complicated to use

OSC is standard and you cant custom it as you would like

CC3 is easy to customize and user friendly but has many bugs for now.

The 2 first ones though do work fine i must say

Wait a little longer and try CC3.02 it shouls be ok.

Hope this helps

[Guest]

I've set up one ZenCart store for a machine parts supplier. I does throw an amazing number or queries at the server for each page but page load speed has never been a major issue. It has been solid with no bugs for a year now. Documentation is pretty good and support has been fine from the user community. But I've never asked for features, just for help.

That said, it was complicated to customize but not nearly impossible like osCommerce. That literally requires you to dig through the php files and change little chunks of embedded html all over the place.

ZenCart Administration is not as simple as I would like, but far from impossible. Again, the documentation is adequate. For the customer, I simply printed out a section of the docs and it is good enough for him to get by with.

I'm just trying Cube Cart now and find the near total lack of documentation pretty annoying. The forums seem active and helpful but forums are much better suited to asking for help on specific issues than learning a program from scratch. I'd have no problem paying the very reasonable license fee if the program included a good manual. As it is, Cube Cart will only live on my development server awaiting my time to learn enough to use it, basically stumbling around by trial and error.

I can see using this for my own sales but, until there is a decent end users guide, I can't see handing it off to a customer. I made the mistake once of giving a client a content management system run site without documentation and spent all my spare time for a month writing a basic manual. That was in addition to the extra support time I had to offer that I hadn't figured into the bid.

It's an odd turn of events when the open source options have extensive documentation and the commerical product has none.

[jerseyjoe]

The lack of docs is a serious shortcoming that will limit CC's acceptance until there are good, fullsome, well illustrated and well indexed PRINTABLE docs.

To be candid in the spirit of seeing that growth happen, something must be done about the obvious fact that CC is pretty much a one man show. That effort has been impressive. No one can deny the talent and dedication behind CC. But before CC will be relied upon for more than small-time online shopping sites, there needs to be some capital invested, staff hired, plus the much needed docs.

Having said that, CC appears to be ahead of the other contenders, due largely to the programmer's attention to the previously mentioned shortcomings of those other two. I hope it continues that leadership and addresses those strategic shortcomings.