Which Shopping Cart to use?

hsj2011

A company I work with has asked me to set them up with a shopping cart. They're unsure of the quantity of products they'll be offering at the moment but plan on using PayPal for payments.

In terms of volume though, the company's turnover last year was just over £2m so I think this is something they'll really want to make successful and will be pushing money at getting it marketed.

Saying that, I don't feel there's any real need for them to pay for a shopping cart system as there are some good free ones around but having trouble deciding.

Their website is built in Joomla so my initial thought was VirtueMart but I've been looking into Magento Community Edition, however, I have heard conflicting things about it. Is it any good for businesses? Or how about OpenCart?

If they did pay for a shopping cart solution, what about Interspire? Anyone used that?

Does Magento Community Edition have limits on how many products you can list?

Thanks in advance.

paddyrg

zencart, prestashop are also worth a look. If they're shifting £2M of goods a year, it would be wise to get the shop hosted with one of the hosts they suggest and buy a good support package - so you can be confident of decent support plus you give back to the develpment community so they are more inclined to develop and improve services

easyhost

hsj2011 wrote: »

A company I work with has asked me to set them up with a shopping cart. They're unsure of the quantity of products they'll be offering at the moment but plan on using PayPal for payments.

In terms of volume though, the company's turnover last year was just over £2m so I think this is something they'll really want to make successful and will be pushing money at getting it marketed.

Saying that, I don't feel there's any real need for them to pay for a shopping cart system as there are some good free ones around but having trouble deciding.

Their website is built in Joomla so my initial thought was VirtueMart but I've been looking into Magento Community Edition, however, I have heard conflicting things about it. Is it any good for businesses? Or how about OpenCart?

If they did pay for a shopping cart solution, what about Interspire? Anyone used that?

Does Magento Community Edition have limits on how many products you can list?

Thanks in advance.

I use opencart and to me after trying many others its the best out their, they have a good solid support system.

Magento is full of bugs and not a stable shopping cart

hsj2011

paddyrg wrote: »

zencart, prestashop are also worth a look. If they're shifting £2M of goods a year, it would be wise to get the shop hosted with one of the hosts they suggest and buy a good support package - so you can be confident of decent support plus you give back to the develpment community so they are more inclined to develop and improve services

Thanks. Sorry, should of mentioned that the £2m they made last year was purely offline and their online sales will probably be a very small portion of that in the future.

easyhost wrote: »

I use opencart and to me after trying many others its the best out their, they have a good solid support system.

Magento is full of bugs and not a stable shopping cart

Yeah, I've just installed both Magento and OpenCart and OpenCart is so much faster. My only issue would be it seems very simplistic and I'm worried about how easy it would be to handle large quantities of sales through it.

One of the things I liked about Interspire was that for each order, you can change the status (as you can with OpenCart) but each different status is colour coded so you can instantly see where the order's upto.

paddyrg

Ahhh that's not a shopping cart so much then, it's an ERP if you want sales processing/invoicing etc attached. Much bigger deal, and probably a better bet to get a team togehter and migrate the business over the course of months... Many shopping carts (eg prestashop, zen, magneto, opencart, etc) will interface with an ERP system, but keep it simple for now, and just look at a pretty simple online store if it is to be kept separate from the offline stuff for now.

But whichever way, buy some kind of support package - maybe including a 'we will set this up and do all the server patching for you' package, which will reduce the hack risks.

hsj2011

paddyrg wrote: »

Ahhh that's not a shopping cart so much then, it's an ERP if you want sales processing/invoicing etc attached. Much bigger deal, and probably a better bet to get a team togehter and migrate the business over the course of months... Many shopping carts (eg prestashop, zen, magneto, opencart, etc) will interface with an ERP system, but keep it simple for now, and just look at a pretty simple online store if it is to be kept separate from the offline stuff for now.

But whichever way, buy some kind of support package - maybe including a 'we will set this up and do all the server patching for you' package, which will reduce the hack risks.

I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean. The three shopping carts I've mentioned all do their own invoicing and sales processing (open cart even lets you set the status of each order and notifies the customer each time their status is changed (not sure about Magento)), but Interspire just displays orders better, etc, if that makes sense?

WLM21

I am trying to learn about shopping carts and have heard good comments about Opencart.

Is it a case of a simple download to let somebody try and 'play about with it'

I have tried FatFreeCart and that is a simple html code which is copied and pasted into a website ... simple, but would take forever for a decent sized shop, ie with many items.

paddyrg

Sorry, I mean that the sales processing is completely ringfenced from the rest of the company - so if I raise a telephone/paper order, they probably fill out some forms, and have a workflow to get the right goods from the warehouse to packaging to dispatch, with a returns department, all sorted already. Using just a shopping cart will not tie in to their systems (eg if they keep stock levels, how will the website know that there are only 3 red doodah's left and stop someone ordering 4? How will the online sales order processing be updated? Will the invoices be consistent with the real-world system ones? etc).

What you need, really, is to tie in to whatever systems they use - but this is a bigger job. This is the shopping cart/ERP integration I mentioned. So either keep it really simple, or tie it into their ERP. If you can *know* that you're not going to sell sold-out products, or duplicate an invoice number, by having manual processes in the online shop (so it is really an order gathering tool with those orders thein being handled much like any telephone order, same forms, same paper, same workflow), then fine, but duplicating functionality is risky.

hsj2011

paddyrg wrote: »

Sorry, I mean that the sales processing is completely ringfenced from the rest of the company - so if I raise a telephone/paper order, they probably fill out some forms, and have a workflow to get the right goods from the warehouse to packaging to dispatch, with a returns department, all sorted already. Using just a shopping cart will not tie in to their systems (eg if they keep stock levels, how will the website know that there are only 3 red doodah's left and stop someone ordering 4? How will the online sales order processing be updated? Will the invoices be consistent with the real-world system ones? etc).

What you need, really, is to tie in to whatever systems they use - but this is a bigger job. This is the shopping cart/ERP integration I mentioned. So either keep it really simple, or tie it into their ERP. If you can *know* that you're not going to sell sold-out products, or duplicate an invoice number, by having manual processes in the online shop (so it is really an order gathering tool with those orders thein being handled much like any telephone order, same forms, same paper, same workflow), then fine, but duplicating functionality is risky.

Thanks for the info.

Basically, company is a bespoke joinery manufacturer, making doors, staircases, etc but the way it's going to work is the company are going to be selling (eg) doors and door parts on the shopping cart, which they haven't previously sold before. I'm also assuming the invoice system, etc will be completely different (i.e. Invoice numbers being WEB001 or something similar, but haven't confirmed this yet).

Regarding Stock, because it's items that won't be sold during their normal channels, if they get 30 stock of one door, the shopping cart should automtaically reduce the stock count on the website (is that right?) and then whoever's overseeing the online shop will request replenishment, etc.

Does that all make sense? Is there an easier way to do it?

easyhost

hsj2011 wrote: »

Thanks for the info.

Basically, company is a bespoke joinery manufacturer, making doors, staircases, etc but the way it's going to work is the company are going to be selling (eg) doors and door parts on the shopping cart, which they haven't previously sold before. I'm also assuming the invoice system, etc will be completely different (i.e. Invoice numbers being WEB001 or something similar, but haven't confirmed this yet).

Regarding Stock, because it's items that won't be sold during their normal channels, if they get 30 stock of one door, the shopping cart should automtaically reduce the stock count on the website (is that right?) and then whoever's overseeing the online shop will request replenishment, etc.

Does that all make sense? Is there an easier way to do it?

Opencart will do this have a play with their demo http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=demonstration/demonstration

paddyrg

If there is one person in charge of the web side of things, shouldn't be too much of a problem as they are a manufacturer, so can make to order if needs be. It's not as if they are going to be waiting on slow boats from China, etc., although you may find it a simpler bet to let the site take the orders then have a human confirm the order and enter it into their regular sales workflow. Anyone ordering doors online isn't looking for a quick drunken 3am Amazon purchase, they aren't buying on price/speed alone, so you may as well use the existing order processing infrastructure which clearly works well (£2M/year, it can't be too shoddy) than try to reinvent the business systems.

Or, if you're going to reinvent the business systems, do it properly throughout the whole company with an ERP throughout (and that means experienced consultants to do a decent job of it). Running two systems in parallel is likely to get messy unless they are separate companies altogether, and managed as such - otherwise someone on the regular sales team suddenly needs 20 doors to close an order, and pinches them from the online stock - that'll be horrible come audit time, and it WILL happen. Or there is a price change in materials, now the online guys have to make sure they update all the prices before they are undercutting their own company. You can see how all kinds of silly situations can (and will, I've done enough of this to be pretty confident) arise unnecessarily if you duplicate sales channels and processing without a comprehensive review.