Visa:
4444 3333 2222 1111

MasterCard:
5424 0000000000 15
(there's 10 zero's in there)

Discover:
6011 0000000000 12
(Again, 10 zero's)

Amex:
37 000000000000 2
(12 zero's in there)

There's also a bunch of other test credit card numbers here in case you need them.

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Zen Cart
Version: 1.3.7
Cost: Free
Comments: In my original review, I complained that the templates were table based and that making it work work with A CSS based layout was cumbersome. I was recently told that the latest version has CSS based templates. I'm looking forward to trying out this cart again to see if it can now do the job I need it to.

You said:
AjnabiZ: "Everytime, i decide to use Zencart, i drop it because they dont have a payment module for 2Checkout." (I see it listed here, though) but AnjabiZ followed up: "If you go and search on their forums, you will find 2checkout module problems. The only module which was released was by a third party and it was for a very old version of Zencart and the original author is not supporting any upgrade of it….the 2checkout module, [was] NOT released by Zencart Team…Zencart team was stated in the forums, that they will NOT create any official module for 2Checkout. They have a grudge against them."

cploonker: "Does not support unregistered purchase"

Andrew Migliore: "I have used Zen Cart and OS Commerce. I believe Zen Cart to be much better and actively worked on. With 1.3.7 theyhave PayPal express checkout which is nice….The templating system is not perfect but all of the css, images, and English text definitions can be overridden fairly easily."

Chad Crenshaw: "Getting use to the way the Zen Cart is set up took a bit of research and work, but it was all worth it."

Dan: "In my view, Zen Cart is definitely the best mainly because of all the information and tutorials available."

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CubeCart
Version: 3.0.16
Cost: To edit or remove the copyright it's $89.95 per domain
Comments: In my original review, I had some issues with the way the shipping worked. (I needed fixed price shipping – different for each product) and as I recall, CubeCart didn't do that.

You said:
cploonker: "No breadcrumb navigation, No advanced search. ie. Search within a category, No latest products in the centre of the page, No hierarchical view for Category/products editing. Specifying the order of category list not allowed…"

Rick: "CubeCart: I’m testing it now on my site… the checkout process is HORRIBLE. It takes 8 cumbersome and confusing (even for me a bit and it’s MY store!) steps for a new user to make a purchase. User registration is also required which I hate."

Doug: "…the next 3.1 version is supposed to use mod-rewrite to be more search engine friendly"

Spark Digital: "I do like [CubeCart] but the CSS is quite heavy and redesigning from scratch can be hard work. It might be easier to use one of the templates as a base and design from there.

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X-Cart
Version: 4.1.7
Cost: (GOLD version) $199
30 Day Trial version available – however IonCube is required on your server to run demo.
Comments: I had trouble with the demo because of that IonCube stuff. I probably could have gotten it working if I had spent more time on it, but I didn't have the time to do that. I had also heard some stories from other designers (whose opinions I valued) about having a lot of difficulty working with their template system. In all – it didn't seem worth the time needed to invest in it. I will add, however, that the X-Cart Sales Manager found this site and that post and actually took the time to respond in the comments with help. So I would assume that their support would be pretty good.

You said:
Kevin: "I’ve used oscommerce and x-cart. Both are a nightmare, but x-cart is by far the most difficult to figure out. The smarty templating system seems to have been a bit overused. There’s just way to may included files for each page. Some have 20 or 30 included files. Figuring out which one you need is a real pain. It can take hours to make small changes."

Andy: "Among paid carts I would like to select X-Cart, because of clear XHTML Transitional compliant nesting."

Cliff: "X-Cart is what I finally ended up with. I think the code is really ugly. Not a class in sight. And clearly a lot of overhead associated with making it work on many version of PHP, shared hosting, different browsers etc. But it works and is very easy to hack. Unlike some solutions that have elegant code, but are impossible to understand."

Chris Williams: "X-Cart did a lot of really great things–things I looked for in a shopping solution, however managing a 70k+ items database isn’t one of them."

Andy: "X-cart code is not ideal (just because it is a commercial product not academical software) but it is far better then most others. X-cart code is divided into specialized modules which execute only when needed almost without redundancy."

Lenny: "X-cart didn’t disappoint me at all, it justified all my hopes…..they provide professional support service and help you without delays. When you become their customer, you can get all information about their patches/upgrade kits, etc."

Kit: "I’ve used x-cart for years, and I’m completely fed up with it. So much so, I’m in the process of rolling my own for the day job. From getting credit cards stolen due to an extremely stupid vulnerability to an exceedingly slow and byzantine database structure to practically being forced to pay for the upgrade service they offer due to the many customizations I’ve created"

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LiteCommerce
Version: 2.2
Cost: $95

You said:
Rick: "I have it on another site. Somewhat difficult to fully customize and the support forums are worthless… but the direct company support has been top notch."

Doug: "We have been using Litecommerce … and been reasonably happy with it. ** LiteCommerce (and, I believe, X-Cart) default to requiring that a customer register with the cart … But I was able to change this to allow customers to buy without registering. ** it doesn’t produce W3C compliant HTML and it does not use mod-rewrite to produce search-engine-friendly URL’s. … [LiteCommerce] rely on producing a parallel static html equivalent of every dynamic page in your shopping cart. This parallel site has to be rebuilt every time you change anything (new product, changing prices, etc.) and seems amazingly clumsy and inelegant."

Andy: "Personally I would recommend LiteCommerce because it is very easy to use and you can purchase as much functionality as you need."

Cliff Hirsch: "I have installed litecommerce and find modifying the templates to be fairly easy. But deciphering the code is impossible. I need to perform heavy customization and am very comfortable hacking PHP. But trying to understand someone elses code and thought process is maddening." (later commented)

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Sun Shop
Version: Latest Version: 4.0 RC 3 Stable Version: 3.5.1
Price: $249.99
Comments: I had found this great review here. Diane also left comments on my post.

You said:
DianeV: "…Sunshop 4 … is implementing … securing the complete login/checkout process … the ability to edit-and-FTP templates … and you can still edit templates through the admin section … And, from what I saw of the templates, it’s pretty much all tableless CSS. ** most of the features I’d need seem to be included in Sunshop 4, so I’m happy."

Valerie: "I ended up going with Sunshop … It is a little much to style… but only, I think, because it’s done in an unconventional way. It’s one big template file and you can either do each little piece in the admin panel or do the whole thing on your computer and upload it when you’re ready. But once I got the hang of a few things, it wasn’t too bad."

(In response to Valerie's Comment above) – DianeV: "I … suggested that they look at the way WordPress treats templates — a folder of files that you edit and FTP onto the server (no clicking through any admin panels). So, from what I can tell from inspecting the files in Sunshop 4 (which is currently out of beta and into the Release Candidates), they’ve done just that."

(A request to be able to have users customize products (ie computers – users specifying what parts they want to add to it, etc.) this comment was in reply to that request.) SmocknMama: "SunShop will let you do that. I am currently using sunshop and like how it works, but it does not integrate well with Quickbooks so I am switching to ClickcartPro and I can everything with it that I could with Sunshop plus better integration with QuickBooks and PeachTree."

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Avactis Shopping Cart
Version: 1.5.3
Cost: $199.00

You Said:
FreeBigBoy2007: "I’ve used Avactis Shopping Cart to develop my store for selling jewelry. And as I found Avactis (http://www.avactis.com) is very easy for the design customization. And I like their backend. Earlier I tried to use OSCommerce but it requires PHP skills for the design customization. With Avactis I had no problems with design even with my basic skills in HTML and CSS."

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Squirrelcart
Version: 2.4
Cost: $129.00
Comments: Squirrelcart is what I ended up using for the site I was working on when I made the post originally. One of the most important features I needed was the ability to have a per product fixed custom price for shipping – which Squirrelcart did. I also really liked their user manual (which is provided online and as a zip you can download). It really made working with the cart very easy. However, I discovered too late that the URLs were not SEO friendly, and that is a big reason why I will probably try something else next time I need to implement a shopping cart.

You said:
cploonker: "No latest products in the center of the page, No support for multi-currency, Different hierarchical view for Category/products editing., Only cart which has a server license. $1000 we can have infinite stores on a single server., Very intuitive interface especially for admin, Very simple code and good design, Can easily be maintained with single copy of store., Support unregistered purchase" (and also later posted) "Reasons [I selected] Zencart was feature rich as compared to cubecart and squirrelcart."

AjnabiZ: "Squirrel Cart certainly lacks many features which are not present in Zencart or even CubeCart."

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OSCommerce
Version: 2.2
Cost: Free

You said:
Kevin: "I’ve used oscommerce and x-cart. Both are a nightmare, but x-cart is by far the most difficult to figure out. ** Oscommerce was easier and didn’t cost anything. Still, not so happy with either."

FreeBigBoy2007: "Earlier I tried to use OSCommerce but it requires PHP skills for the design customization."

Rudy: "As an osCommerce nerd since many years I would always recommend to use osC but the learning curve is pretty steep. "

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Storesprite
Version: 6? (7 appears to be in beta at the moment?)
Cost: Free – to remove copyright £39.99

You said:
Shirley: "We use www.storesprite.com ecommerce which is really easy to customise and has a wicked control panel. No need to know php – just html."

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CRE Loaded
Version: 6.2
Cost: $10 donation (optional?). A version with more features (6.2 Pro) is available for $145.

You said:
Cploonker: "No latest products in the center of the page, Multi-currency, Support unregistered purchase" (later posted) "[Zencart had] phenomenally better code quality than it’s nearest competitor CRELoaded."

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Ecommerce Templates
Version: (unknown)
Price: Varies depending on template purchased (roughly between $149 – $159)

You said:
fatmanslimming: "I have played with Zen cart, cube cart, and oscommerce and finally settled with the blank template from ecommercetemplates.com, its css driven. has a nice hackable php/sql backbone and is cheap"

Marvin: "[I] looked at www.ecommercetemplates.com. I can’t remember why I decided not to use them, but everyone I emailed from their community really liked it."

Spark Digital: "easy to redesign but if you want to redesign the table structure of the products and cats then you have to do this deep within the php files – not great. This is also the case with the CSS version (it has tables!) so I moved on after doing one site."

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Pinnacle cart
Version: 3.5.1 (?)
Cost: $597.00

You said:
Craig (product development manager for Pinnacle Cart) "Take a look at Pinnacle Cart. The code is very well laid out; we intentionally use only one developer on the main code base for this exact reason. You’ll notice it’s MUCH easier to understand." "Our cart is built on a template system that allows you to completely manage the look and feel of the site without HTML, but if you want to get a unique look and feel, you can get into the HTML code you will find it very easy to change. Our cart does use mod-rewrite to produce SE friendly URL’s …We are going to be launching a “true” one-page checkout within the next couple of weeks, it will be the fastest possible checkout process on any cart. We have both ioncube and Zend available. We support multi- currency, multi-language."

AjnabiZ: "Pinnacle Cart is good but its price it too high. You can get other carts under $200."

Doug: "If pinnacle has the features claimed then … the $600 pricetag isn’t excessive. ** The pinnacle cart product only comes with a 30 day money-back guarantee which doesn’t really seem long enough particularly for someone building their first cart."

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PHPShop
Version: 0.8
Cost: Free

You Said:
KiddChaos: "Works, and is free…I can’t say I like the look of it…Some tweaks in setup needed."

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Trading Eye (Shopping cart and CMS)
Version: 5
Cost: £ 599.

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QuickCart
Version: (unknown)
Cost: Free (more features with paid version: 44 EUR)

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PHPBasket
Version: 4.0.2
Cost: CAN $250

You said:
Mark Edmondson: (works for PHPBasket) "…personal help and support … is something that the larger commercial (or free open source) carts don’t provide. I’ve been working with my shopping cart application for several years now, providing one on one support with all clients from installation, customization and additional features, it’s just proving terribly difficult to drag people away from the big horrible existing carts!"

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VirtueMart
Version:
Cost: Free
Comments: Integrates with Joomla CMS.

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ClickcartPro
Version: 6
Cost: $249.99

You said:
SmocknMama: "I am switching to ClickcartPro and I can [do] everything with it that I could with Sunshop plus better integration with QuickBooks and PeachTree."

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CS-Cart
Version: (Unknown)
Cost: $195

You said:
AjnabiZ: "I am opting for CS-Cart, it has the most features and it has some very nice reviews. I have checked their forums and the team is very responsive."

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Some other comparison, reviews:
Shopping Cart Reviews – A massive list of reviews, side by side comparison of Cube Cart, Zen Cart and Squirrelcart.

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What I have discovered is that I (and your experience may vary) can not stand Zen Cart. I liked the idea of it being free, and open source, and etc. etc. – but it's just unusable. I had already designed what I wanted the store to look like and needed to go apply that design to their theme. It took hours and hours and I finally gave up. One of the biggest problems is that tables were so embedded into the "basic" design, that modifying anything meant screwing everything else up.

Then I gave Cube Cart a try – (which is free if you agree to keep their copyright notice at the bottom). First of all, it's a store, I'm sure my client will have no issue paying the pretty minimal fee to remove the copyright – but before I ask them to shell out the money, I want to make sure that I can actually use the system, and apply the design. Which so far I've been able to do – mainly because their basic design is a CSS-based layout!! Not only that, the template files are easy to figure out and understand which one will do what. In just a few hours I've been able to get three times as far as I did futzing around with Zen Cart.

My only complaint is that I can't find a comprehensive "tag" (or XML) list and/or a good tutorial on how to modify everything about the template. It's been a lot of trial and error – and some of the things I wanted to do apparently require a mod (that usually costs money). Again, it would be nice to TRY some of them to see if it does what I want, but not all the mods have that same "try first – buy after" philosophy.

Still – modifying Cube Cart, even without a tutorial, had been infinitely easier than it was with Zen Cart. And the nice thing is that now that I've been working on modifying the Cube Cart pages for a little while, I feel a lot more confident about what I'm doing.

Update Well, I'm getting a little frustrated with Cube Cart. Ran into a few snags with shipping that I can't seem to fix. Going to give either one or both LiteCommerce and X-Cart a try. If anyone has worked with any of these shopping cart packages – I'd love to hear what your experience is. Liked it? Loved it? Hated it? Prefer a different package? (if so why?) Feel free to link to a post on your own blog that talks about it.

Update 1/4/07: One of the things we wanted to do was have a "fixed/custom shipping cost" for the products (ie. not have it calculate shipping based on weight or whatever) – as well as not make it required for users to have to "register" in order to make a purchase… X-Cart apparently does both of these… Going to try to install their demo version and give it a test drive. I'll keep posting updates on the progress…

Update 1/5/07: Well, heard a few horror stories about customizing X-Cart – as well I can't even install their demo because of that Ioncube thing. Here's a long list of other shopping cart packages. Eenee Meenee Minee Mo… /sigh

Update 1/7/07: Was considering Sunshop – but am now hesitating after reading this review. Next one up for review: Extcart / Avactis (are these TWO different packages? or the same one??)

Update 1/12/07: This has been quite the saga. I have tested out more shopping cart packages than I can count at this point. The ones that had the features I needed, had confusing templates. The ones that had easy to customize templates, didn't have the features I needed. I'm not interested in writing my own. Whole companies are made out of just writing this type of software, and that is not the business I want to be in. So I took a look at Squirrelcart. I had originally dismissed them because they didn't have a "demo/trial" copy I could install and play with. But at this point I was desperate. I looked at their online admin demo, and it appeared to have the features we needed. I asked their sales department for a sample template I could look at and they sent me one right away. There's a lot of files, but they're not completely confusing. The part that sold me was their documentation that outlines all the templates what they do and how to find the template you need to modify. As well, all the templates are pretty well commented so if there's something showing up on your page and you want to find the template it came from you can just view source and it's usually noted in the comments. I was told if I purchased the software I would have a 14 day evaluation period, so I bought it. I'm still in the process of customizing it for our client, but I've gotten pretty far in a fairly short amount of time. They don't currently support the payment gateway we've signed on with, but I'm told they can add it. Still waiting to hear the final word on that. So far I've been pretty satisfied and would recommend them.

Update 1/16/07: I spent a big portion of the weekend tinkering around with Squirrelcart, and implementing our custom template for it and I'm still very pleased with it. I know there's been a number of comments suggesting trying other carts, some of them I had tested and didn't care for. I know Squirrelcart is missing some features some other packages have, but the important part is that it had what we needed. Should a client come along that needed one of those other features (that Squirrelcart doesn't currently have), then I'll probably have to look into some other packages, but in the meantime, I'm satisfied with what I got. In any case, feel free to keep the comments and suggestions coming. It's always interesting to see what else is out there, and it will be good reference should I need to look for another cart in the future.

IMPORTANT NOTE PLEASE NOTE THE DATES at which this post and comments were made. I have indicated the versions of the software discussed in this thread on this post (and summarized some of the comments as well – consider that one the "Cliff Notes" version of this very long thread).

UPDATED 8/12/2008 Due to the length of this thread, I've both closed comments on this thread and opened up a seperate forum so that discussion can continue. Shopping Cart specific forums are here. (I created a number of other forum topics close to my heart as well)

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