Shopping cart software and online payments

ericpode

Several years ago, I set my brother up with an online shopping cart software using the shared SSL facility of his web hosting provider to take online orders.

The software however is a bit old and far too inflexible, and I have to do a lot of the work in getting the details and images uploaded.

So I need to find a replacement for him that will be easy for him to use, add products, change options, upload product descriptions and images etc, but which must also require minimal support from me.

I gather OS Commerce and Zen seem to be well thought of here - I'll take a look at these.

Do these automatically scale and optimise images? (I find it difficult to impress upon him the importance of image size and compression level so it would be VERY useful if the software could take full resolution digital camera pics and scale/compress them itself automatically before uploading).

He has a merchant account and has been using this to process orders offline. He phones for authorisation for each order, but I don't think that this protects agains fraud or chargeback. Now we have chip-and-pin and as I understand it the banks will now only protect the seller from fraudulent transactions if the PIN was provided at the time of purchase. How does this fit in with online purchases? You can't provide a PIN (I suppose) when shopping online, so what can an online shop owner do now to protect themselves against fraud and chargebacks?

buglawton

I am also looking and the shortlist so far is Oscommerce and Cubecart. The former is free but requires more expertise. the latter places the words "Powered by Cubecart" in the Title and Footer till you pay a $70 license fee. Both need a MySQL + PHP enabled Hosting Service.

One really big topic of contention is that these ecommerce management tools produce poorly Google optimized sites so you get fewer visits from search engines than a hand crafted site.

Some basic php and sql skills are helpful.

Jury is still out for me - I will be making a decision sometime soon.

ericpode

Zencart might be worth a look too. It is based on oscommerce but has a lot of extras built in.

According to this thread, product pages appear to show up OK in Google:

http://www.zen-cart.com/modules/ipb/index.php?showtopic=42920&hl=

buglawton

Thanx for that, and Zencart appears to be free. Choices, choices...

buglawton

Since my original post I plumped for Cubecart. The basic install (with enhanced Linux Hosting from easiliy.co.uk) took but a few hours and went faultlessly. You need 'moderate' computing skill e.g need to know how to use ftp and what file permissions are.

We purchased (£5.99) a different 'skin' for the e-shop to suit the Handbags & Fashion Accessories sort of mood. My wife is busy putting the products in through the easy-to-use admin screens.

I am realy impressed with this shopping cart software (it was FREE as long as you don't mind leaving Cubecart's message in the page title where you don't really see it) and very cheap to licence fully. I discovered that this packaged adaptation of Open Source is made in the UK.

Theres is a problem-solving forum for mods & fixes.

Next we plan to adapt the shop more fully for separate Wholesale and Retail pricing. The link is in my Profile if anyone is curious.

Cheers
Nigel