Choosing online Shopping Cart

[JohnFabric3D]

Hello all,

New to the Forum but have been using FutureQuest for over a year now. I need some input from experienced idividuals like yourselves.

I am in the process of choosing an Online Shopping Cart for my wife's website www.fabric3d.com I need any input on a good, low priced, easy to use Cart. We plan on selling Interior Decorating items on it like: pillows, curtains, softsculpture, blinds, etc... The cart needs to be flexible enough to support many options per item. Some of the items have options and measurements that need to be inputted by the user. Measurements and options can also determine the total price of an item also.

So you see the Cart will have to have the ability to handle many options and inputs from the shoppers. Any help would be appreciated, thanks in advance.

John
Webmaster
Fabric 3D
www.fabric3D.com

[Rich]

The requirement for options with their own prices is an advanced shopping cart feature. Unfortunately, there aren't any low-cost advanced-features shopping carts.

Here's a couple that should handle your feature requirements:

Americart (www.americart.com) - a hosted solution - $90/quarter or $249 per year

Miva Merchant (www.miva.com) - $695

[Rich]

PDG Shopping Cart 2002 (www.pdgsoft.com) is another reasonably priced cart that has advanced option handling - $399

[Syneryder]

Out of curiosity Rich, do you know if QuikStore (http://www.quikstore.com/) can also handle this?

[Rich]

Out of curiosity Rich, do you know if QuikStore can also handle this?
Yes, it appears that Quickstore can handle options with individual pricing. I'm not familiar with Quickstore but it appears to have many advanced features.

Pricing is about $250 after adding the credit card payment module. Figure about $300 if you also want to add-on the Paypal module. It is a little unclear from their web site whether you can have both a traditional payment module and paypal at the same time, although this would be a highly desirable feature.

[JohnFabric3D]

Thanks for all the responses so far.

I have located a FREE Open Source Shopping Cart called FISHCART www.fishcart.org that looks like it has the functionality that I am looking for.

Still researching though.

John
Webmaster
Fabric 3D
www.fabric3d.com

[Rich]

I have located a FREE Open Source Shopping Cart
My only advice here is to choose wisely and test thoroughly. A shopping cart is a very complex application and you usually get what you pay for. If you cut corners your will either wind up with something so buggy no customers will use it or it is so complicated technically to install/support that you will need to spend what you save to have someone with advanced skills install or fix it for you.

The three original recommendations I made are carts which have existed for several years with a large customer base. These carts should need much less testing to confirm they will fit your needs than just any of the thousands of carts on the market.

Other FQ site owners here might also recommend a cart they are using that has the features you are needing.

[WayneK]

I have used http://www.clickcartpro.com/ twice.

It isn't real polished. The HTML is rough and it requires a some hand tweaking both in the HTML and Perl. Go to their forum, for a better understanding.

But it is very flexible, so of you can bumble around code a bit it does work.

** New version due out any day now **

I am doing a new one here http://chadwicks.org/cgi-bin/ccp5/cp-app.cgi trying to get a few Mac/netscape7 users to tell me if the grey table cell backgrounds show up. http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=14851

[Evoir]

I really like quikstore. I am using it for two non-futurequest sites. I am doing a purely html store this time, and it is a piece of cake. :) But, it costs about $300 including plugins (and Rich, I don't know the answer to your question of the top of my head).

But, I really like this cart. :)

[tappel]

Now that the Secure_Mode deployment is completed, FQ'ers might want to take a look at X-Cart (www.x-cart.com). X-Cart requires PHP and MySQL; it is reasonably priced and very customizable for those who are good with HTML and CSS. If you are good with PHP and familiar with Smarty templates, it's even better. I use X-Cart for my e-commerce site hosted here and have been very satisfied.

It's a little quirky from the administative end and the support team only works regular business hours (Russian time) but, overall, I'd say it's worth a look.

Tom