On the second site, I started with Cube Cart but the checkout process was on 6 pages! This was a year ago so I don’t know if they’ve updated or not. It’s very important from a usability standpoint to make the checkout as easy as possible otherwise you’ll get lots of dropped carts. On of the most critical parts of making a successful store is to reduce abandoned carts.

After wasting 2 weeks with Cube Cart, I was impressed with the open source spirit of Zen Cart. The site took 10 times as long as it should have and updates are horrendously complicated.

I HATE ZEN CART! Small changes take hours! It’s like having to take apart half of your entire car to do a tune up. The forums are helpful but also full of idiots who say things like “why would you want to have people NOT register before making a purchase?” BECAUSE THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT AND DOESN’T GIVE A DAM ABOUT YOUR BLOATED HIPPYWARE CODE! The mods and hacks were painful.

Conclusion:

http://ecommercetemplates.com/ - it has its quirks but is fairly inexpensive and flexible. Updates are moderately easy (I have heavily modified sites) Support is outstanding.

Cubecart - as of a year ago it was garbage and judging from the above is probably still that way. It’s appealing at first but not ready for prime time.

Zen Cart - There’s nothing Zen about it. It’s a gigantic mess of code. A small change usually requires 3 file changes. This bitch is high maintenance - avoid unless you like to be the submissive partner.

I am trying to customize or find a skin to help me get the look/feel for our site. We sell car parts so we have ALOT of sub catergories. For example, “Air & Fuel Deliveries” has about 6 sub catergories. Can anyone help me figure out how to show that without the customer having to click on the main catergory to see the sub catergories????

http://www.interspire.com/storesuite/

I have blogged about both these carts.

good luck,
Scott

When I started looking around at other cube cart sites that were using authorize.net - they all did the same thing, too… If you can explain (or post a link that explains) how to make it work - I would greatly appreciate it!

That’s not true - you just need to get yourself an SSL certificate and set up CubeCart accordingly, and you will be able to have users enter their details on your site and these are then sent to Authorize.net

I’ve followed your cart hunt for awhile from a distance. I ended up choosing CubeCart as well — for a variety of reasons.

But… I’m really fascinated by your donation mod. I have 2 business partners bugging me (okay, I’ll be nice) asking me on a regular basis for this functionality in CubeCart stores we’ve set up.

I’m looking forward to your full documentation of that, although now that you’ve conveyed your approach conceptually, I’m ready to dive in and give it a shot!

Thanks for the great info!

If you ever need something more full-featured, yet still free, you might take a look at Magento. It’s an open source e-commerce platform from Varien, a Web development company that specializes in e-commerce. They’re basically open sourcing their in-house tools. It’s being released this month, and I’m looking forward to experimenting with it.

One drawback: because it’s built on the Zend Framework, Magento requires PHP 5.

I’m in the process of setting up cubecart for a digital products site and its been a lot of work, but your links have been helpful.