Shopping Cart Community

I've started the process of looking at where my own store is going to be in the future and having just experienced an OpenCart store from the front end I was wondering just how user friendly it actually is... more importantly what is it missing.

Tony I know is one proponent, but is anyone else using or looking at these...

In particular I'm keen to know about:

• Royal Mail integration specifically how it works, are there tables of values or is it manual price entry? Are contract prices supported?
• Linnworks supported? - I see some problems with SKU's for variations are reported for example.
• Variations? Compared to ISC, are these a better implimentation, same or worse?

Overall I'd like to know what in particular has struck you about the cart, given your experience with ISC, what you really like but just as importantly what annoyances exist that drive you potty

Thanks in advance..

TBH as it's a free bit of kit, best bet is to kick the tyres on your server

The community is very active, way more active than anything ISC ever offered, with lots, and lots of mods out there, and a decent amount of guys who know their stuff.

Lots of mods are free, others paid - paid ones by and large are a tenner or so. The coding model is different to ISC, so takes a bit of getting used to if you're wanting to add in things that you've already modded. The 'vqmod' system is absolute genius IMO - it's an addon itself, but free, and allows you to make addon code that sits seperately to core files (XML file with all the changes as find/replace/add instructions - see here http://code.google.com/p/vqmod/), so changes persist during upgrades, without any compare diff ball scratching. Majority of changes I've done to our sites use vqmods.

The mod store is very good - none of the forum bollocks of ISC, but an actual shop (the creator, Daniel, takes a cut of every sale) - so any mods you do, you can add there and get paid for, or give away.

I've not got any real specific answers for the Qs you've posted, though variations is better by a long way, I've a mod ($10??) that takes care of multiple SKUs for variations (also does a lot more than that).

Gripes that I have, that are probably easily solvable with free, or paid mods (I've just not bothered looking, lol!) as follows:

• Product filtering in backend is a bit pants - no easy way to search
  In fact, no easy way to search orders or customers either
  No built in import/export (this is a free easy fix, but daft omission)

Erm, nothing else leaping out actually?

Pro points

• Nice start layout
  Good built in banner system
  Easy to set up new layouts
  Built in rewards & affiliate systems
  Good checkout process
  Good image handling (mostly, finding image in media manager can be faffy, again, fixable, just never bothered)
  vqmod system is insanely good

I guess one 'drawback' is that I'm very used to using Drupal installs at the minute, and it doesn't have the flexibility of a full on CMS, but you can tag the 2 together (no official modules, booo), or there are some surprisingly powerful CMS mods available - just added a news one to one of our sites, butchered it into a recipe section, works a treat.

Thanks for the reply...

Looks like I'll have to put some time in to check what it all does... Interesting about the currency handling aspect of things but looking at some of them it seems there's some rather "interesting" half baked modules out there.

I've not delved into currency stuff much, but it does have easy flick between currencies bits built in - if you use fixed exchange rates that's ideal, that wasn't suitable for one store I did as we needed fixed currency pricing, which wasn't built in, and I didn't see an obvious mod for - though did find one some time after building a prestashop site... gah! On that note, prestashop is a very powerful bit of kit, just fugly, and hard to navigate the backend of. I think it was coded by some full on geeks who knew their snuff when it came to function, but were a bit retarded when it came to form...

Tony Barnes wrote:I've not delved into currency stuff much, but it does have easy flick between currencies bits built in - if you use fixed exchange rates that's ideal, that wasn't suitable for one store I did as we needed fixed currency pricing, which wasn't built in, and I didn't see an obvious mod for - though did find one some time after building a prestashop site... gah!

Interesting... From the digging I did it seemed that the currency side of things was actually based less on assumption and more on the potential of multi-currency.

Obviously I'm going to need to do some installing followed by some serious digging to see what I can figure out... Now where did I put that cloning machine?...

I dug around with it for a bit, among others, but I've just made the switch to LemonStand instead. The support has been great.

Shame that your Royal Mail module doesn't work on there, I pretty much gave up on ISC after it decided that I could no longer create new products after an update... just problem after problem.

Honestly, if you are planning on moving to something new and have some dev knowledge (which I know you do), Lemonstand is just so much nicer than ISC.

It is generally good, but you have to set your expectations right. Open source without proper (preferably vendor support) will not be compliant with PCI DSS (or at least its much harder) so you can't use one page checkout with card payment etc.

We have been researching this subject for a long time after Interspire announced that they will not support ISC in 2012 and we have ended up using Jigoshop, which our clients are happy with.

Kind Regards,
Paul Preston