OSComerce offers alot of free plugins and a huge community that is ready to help you for free.

In general you will need to look into what exactly you need and expect from your shipping cart and then try a few of them to see what it all is about.

I am using zencart which is supposed to be a slightly easy cart then Oscommerce but coming across PHP for the first time Zencart has been a massive learrning curve for me

There are many but most of them are Premium that means you have to pay for them like Xcart.

I will suggest you to go for oscommerce because for script,community is very important. If it is big then you will get lot of hands in the development and support which is very important to run a ecommerce site.

I don't think that commercial solutions is bad choice . Free Oscommerce is good one however if you want to be absolutely confident about your partner you may like to choose commercial software like X-cart with official support service.
Also i've heard they even started providing their own hosting service for X-cart owners , that means they care about their customers.

However i would agree that if you start the business free solution will work great.

Dear you

First of all. Thank you about your interesting ideas. I would like to invite you visit url: http://www.shoppingvietnam.net . Smart ideas store. The best online services. We will supply the best e_commerce solutions for you.
Please contact us: Mr TuanTrinh
Email: tuantx@shoppingvietnam.net
trinhtuanfhute@yahoo.com
trinhxuantuan@gmail.com
cellphone: 84.977272265
84.904392626
website: www.shoppingvietnam.net
We're looking forward from you

Give my regard to you

ps: tuantx

It seems we all agree that OsCommerce is a good enough solution, but some of you suggest commercial solutions if better stability is needed. What seems to be forgotten is the issue of budget. Naturally, if you have the money to spend on your webshop, it's easy to find a good (or even great) solution. But if your budget is limited, then OsCommerce is definitely a solution I would recommend.

I just recently opened a webshop myself (together with my business partner), and because we had a somewhat limited budget we decided on OsCommerce. It has worked perfect for us so far. See for yourselves at http://www.filmmusikkiosken.se.

I've tried CubeCart before, and even though there's nothing wrong with CubeCart, I still would recommend OsCommerce because of its potentials.

I served for several years as a Senior Team Member with the osCommerce project and can honestly say that its development progress is less than admirable with nothing other than bug fix releases since its initial 2.1 release in 2001.

As a consequence and due to our own needs for an up to date solution, Suomedia have created our own "fork" of the osCommerce project which we intend to release very shortly. It features:

• Complete separation of business logic from display logic (no more osCommerce "spaghetti" code.
• Fully W3C XHTML CSS valid output.
• Template structure (table-less design) - designing is an absolute breeze.
• ADODB abstraction layer for portability to other RDBMS.
• Massively reduced database queries - the standard osCommmerce makes 92 database queries to load the default front page. Ours makes just 13 queries to load exactly the same content.
• Extensive caching functionality, including query caching to further enhance performance.

This will be released as fully GPL code and does not feature the code bloat and complexity of other osC forks such as Zen and CRE.


Matti Ressler
Suomedia

Yes, if you choose Open Source, you get the community. Community is of course a grat thing, but the fact is they don't have to help you. If you really get into trouble, you stay alone with your broken code and your malfunctioning shop.

Companies that offer paid solutions have quality support. If you bought the shop script from them, they HAVE TO help you get it working. And they usually can do it quickly because it's them who written all the code, and not the abstract "community".

So I was looking for paid solutions only. I tested about five of them and stopped at Avactis shopping cart - it's not that cheap, while has very nice customization features. And the admin area is MUCH clearer that of Open Source stuff (especially Zen Cart).
And it integrates with Google Checkout, too

Here's one more helpful link: Shopping Cart Reviews - there's quite a lot of stuff to choose from.

This is not true at all. Any decent Open Source project has mountains of paid support available (along with mountains of free support also) and most (one notable one previously mentioned excluded) have very active bug reporting/update programs.

What you are saying is akin to saying that if I choose Redhat for my servers I am at a disadvantage for support, extensibility etc. while if I instead choose Micro$oft and IIS I am much better off. We all know this simply is not true

Open source also has a massive advantage with a brains trust that closed source will never match and the fact is is OPEN ... you can do anything you need to with the code (including fixing it, which you cant with closed source).


Matti Ressler
Suomedia