CS-Cart, ISC, Magento or cocktail under palm tree?

[TERWO]

I've been trying to be calm with all bugs we've had with ISC and with the latest 6.1.8 & lack of Interspire and their support. 5 days so far and no reply to our problem. They asked for FTP access thou, which we gave immediately to let them see our CHMOD etc. settings. I know all those are ok. I have checked them all 10+times if ISC rewrites something over. ISC is/was great in many ways but the bugs and all other issues with Interspire makes all good things fade away. I'm not going to go details or blame specific people at Interspire but I think more like the whole company with their management has serious issues within their own house. Diplomacy doesn't exist "in-da-house". I would recommend Borat to take leadership and make their BigFarcemerce the greatest ever existing on demand cart. They built it with ISC and funds of ISC customers who also gave them ideas, voting for great tools, sharing some great ideas which they took to BigFarcemerce and not giving those tools to us - not even fixing old bugs. Here in Bangkok we have old saying - "Feels like a bitch in woods without cash but I gave it all.". What the locals want to say is "You were friendly and I trusted on you, but all you gave me was tons of problems and hungry stomach". Interspire forum is full of angry customers who are expressing their frustration towards Interspire and people who lead it. Still.... they want to delete, ban, crush, hammer them down. I think the high point of Interspire and their ways to do their "management" is far from reality. That's all what I have to say about it - I'm done with it.

FUTURE... let's talk about it.. that's what we all love to hear at the end of tunnel. Yeap. there's always light at the end of tunnel, no matter what some say.....

CS CART ... It looks like we all want to move on to something new, exciting, working solution and make money and provide our best to our families. I know we are still "hanging on" with some ISC features and I think it's just a matter of time when those are available in some other cart - or let some programmer to do it. I have been experimenting with their Pro edition (trial) and going to go for Ultimate with 10 store fronts. I have plans to go for 50-100 storefronts where we are finally able to centralize our business and shipping with 600 representatives and 90 countries. IF...and once more IF that works like they claim. It's going to be something great for any company. Backend is nice, available templates are ok and easy to understand how their cart works. Admin functions are ok. There's still plenty of ways to make it easier and give some more tools ..no doubt. I will post news about this Ultimate - multistore system when we get it running. My company and staff are excited about it and so are our representatives who finally can concentrate to sell and promote than maintaining website and battle with all kinds of stupid cart based problems. Time will tell how it all goes but thumbs up to CS Cart.

MAGENTO - Fast, lots of tools available for additional price which is good. Lots of ready modules and addons available. Back end was messy to me but after spending some 2-4 hours with it all started to look good. I think what keep shopkeepers away from Magento is the backend and configuration how it works. It's not the easiest - I have to admit. Lots of templates which makes it easier to find the right template and do some changes & custom graphics. Good choice to someone for sure.

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I wish prosperous times and future to all of you finding the best possible cart. Last but not least...I'm going to get that cocktail under the palm tree right after pressing SUBMIT .... time for Tom Collins

[kurt]

Let us know what you decide. I'm probably going to switch to hosted cart but I'm not sure which one yet. I'm holding out to see what LemonStandNow looks like. I may go with MagentoGo though.

[Brandeline]

Splash Alert!

I'm taking the plunge and just bought my CS-Cart 3 license today.

Now to work on transferring 10,000+ customers and all their orders, and 1500+ products...

Wish me luck!

[TERWO]

I wish you good luck with your choice. We are now also having CS Cart Ultimate with 4 storefront and 5 addon modules & 3 tweaks to code. I just couldn't pass Magento or ignore it. We are now doing one new site with Magento cart + around 10 additional modules and tweaks. I think 4 was free and 6 were paid modules & addons. We spent around $900USD for Magento addon modules and tweaks. So far it all looks good and we are ready for both - CS Cart and Magento.

We did conversion from ISC to CS Cart and also from ISC to Magento database. Around 80K customer database was perfectly converted to new cart. I used CART2CART (www.shopping-cart-migration.com), you can actually convert to almost any cart you like to. Their service was 5 Star and conversion went 100% without any problems.

CS CART was a great surprise to me personally. I never expected it to be so easy to use. Easy to work with blocks & modify the overall look of website. We are planning to make shipping by weight section easier - like on ISC. Easier to make such simple 'by weight' list (and easy to print from browser for quick check).

What makes me still nervous is the CS Cart with 4 storefronts on single server. I thought their multistore system would work on any server and connected together. High traffic sites and 4 store fronts on same server ? Still a big question mark for me.

[Brandeline]

If the migration is really that easy I'll be thrilled You didn't have to massage any data or fix little things after the transfer?

I am not a consultant and only have two stores, so will probably stick with CS Cart once I get everything up and running. I'm liking all the features, though sometimes the interface design on the back end looks like it was designed by a bunch of Russian programmers... oh WAIT it WAS!

But that is a billion times better than being saddled with anything Interspire any longer. In terms of time lost, customers lost, money lost... Interspire is probably the most expensive piece of software I've ever bought. Good bye and good riddance ISC!

[TERWO]

Migration was really that easy. We have tried to find some errors but couldn't. It truly looks like winning a lottery . No tuning no nothing with database. We also asked our customers to check their previous orders, just in case if someone needed "order history". No complaints any kind.

Brandeline - I fully agree with your comment about backend. There's lots of to do with it. They should simplify it and keep certain elements together. However, for me it was better than any other cart (inc. Magento) to work with. I'm happy to support CS Cart and their future development.

[kurt]

It's good to know that shopping-cart-migration.com works good. Did you purchase this option "Preserve order IDs on the Target Store (+$49)"? Did customer passwords change?

Seems like it would probably work well going from isc to bc instead of this crappy process https://support.bigcommerce.com/questio ... ommerce%3F

[kurt]

I tried cart2cart and it didn't work too well. It basically created a products.csv and a customers.csv then had instructions on how to import them to BC. After the import, I noticed several issues:

Around 20 products are missing, they didn't import and I'm not sure which ones yet.
The main product image was swapped with a secondary image on a lot of products.
Product dimensions were not present in the products.csv file
Stock tracking was set to "by product" in products.csv for every single product!!
Product UPC was blank in products.csv

Not to mention, it doesn't support importing customer order history or passwords. Plus it doesn't support importing variations.

This is going to be a lot of work just fixing the product dimensions, images, stock, and adding variations back in. It was almost useless.

[kurt]

I was on ISC 6.1.1. I ended up just using the built in export feature then importing to BC. It worked better than cart2cart. What's really dumb is you can export orders in ISC and BC but cannot import them. That means it's easier to move from ISC to almost any other cart than to BC if you want to retain order history.