Hi,

I am on the road to starting an online business with a lot of products (1000+) thus would like to know which is the best shopping cart out there, my main criteria is that it should be easily customizable and hopefully free or not extremely expensive.

Thanks

You can try oscommerce.

Good question to which there is no good answer. The best for what?

Your criteria, free and easily customizable, would tend towards the use of Open Source carts. Some of the best known include osCommerce, Zen Cart, osC Max and Magento. Ease of customization varies based on the value of programmer capability.

Don't expect to avoid paying the costs of doing business. Free software will reduce your cash costs, but impose others. Do expect to do a lot of research, and apply yourself to learning a complex set of operational skills. If it were easy, anyone would play.....

thanks a lot for the replies.... could you all please mention some commercial software.....

thanks

and also which is more easily customizable Zen Cart or OS Commerce..... and please mention why .... thx agn

Not particularly. While my partner has done some work with Product Cart, I myself prefer to stick to Open Source carts.

I doubt the difference is important to anyone who is either familiar with or unfamiliar with both. Zen Cart however, has additional functionality and imposes at least a few further demands in structuring the code compared to osCommerce. So, to those who are familiar with one but not the other, it would be the cart with which they are familiar.

Unless Zen Cart has done some substantial restructuring in the past few releases which is unreflected in their version ID's, both would be likely to be considered easier than say, Magento to an average self trained PHP coders who did not focus on object oriented code.

The major differences between any osCommerce based release and Magento at the moment is the extent of third party modules available vs ease of coding for new modules. Which is another story....

David

so which one would u recommend looking at all aspects?.... since i havent used any i dont mind learning a new one..... would u recommend OSCommerce or Zen Cart?

I would tend to recommend osCommerce.

osCommerce