Well?

[Martin]

So, has anyone reached any conclusions or have you all been admitted to mental health facilities with soft padded walls and pretty gardens?

[Tony Barnes]

I'm actually going to be looking at using Live Cart for another site install we need - its multi-currency seems to be robust - we need pricing in pound & euros - with set pricing in each, rather than a conversion. Free too, so will see if that means feautre poor!

[Brandeline]

This is gonna sound crazy maybe, but for now I'm sticking with my 6.1.1 Interspire Cart. But knowing there will not be any further development time put into it by Interspire, I'm going to feel a lot more free to hack it mercilessly.

There's no point in maintaining an 'upgrade path' for something that will never be getting one. Which means I can really do what I want with it without fear.

[MegaFemaTron2]

I've come to the same conclusion as Brandeline today. Last week I really thought I was going to be able to rock a new website with ExpressionEngine 2 and Cartthrob 2. ExpressionEngine cost me $299 for a commercial license and Cartthrob cost me $99. What a let down. Good thing I can get a refund for both. You basically have to build your own cart from the ground up just to find out it doesn't do the most basic things and CT doesn't even come with it's own admin panel to actually administer the cart after you set it up. EE is worthless without more expensive add-ons. Prior to going the EE route I'd scoured the net for just one decent cart that offered a coupon system that restricted coupon use to once per customer (another reason I went to Cartthrob) but ultimately, if it had that feature, it lacked other important features. So now I'm back to keeping ISC and hiring someone to fix the coupon module. I don't know about anyone else but that once per customer thing is just critical. I'm trying to step up my game and rock a fantastic affiliate program and get more customers and I don't even have a useable coupon option. With what I sell, letting customers use a coupon over and over will bleed me dry.

It does suck that being able to extend ISC is so hard because of the lack of documentation. But given that for the most part what it has is fine for me, it's not a deal breaker to keep it BUT if I can't fix the coupon thing, it is a worthless cart for me.

So if anyone knows of a cart with most of the features ISC has AND has a once per customer coupon system, then I'm all over it! Unless it's not self-hosted, I'm not down with "renting" a shopping cart either.


*UPDATE* Well I went home last night I checked to see if I could find the ISC change logs and decided to update the cart to 6.1.1 and to my delight, that version does indeed have the ability to limit coupon usage to once per customer.

On another note, they have released 6.1.6 and people are regretting doing the upgrade. I did find the change logs and can't believe some of the bugs they've had to fix. Until they just fixed it, if a customer added more than one item to the cart is would charge them double or more than what the total should be in version 6.1.6... I mean, you can't even use a cart that does that at all. Accurate totaling is the bare minimum. But whatever.

[babyREFLUX]

Can't believe you chaps are still investing time in ISC

As things stand we'll be moving over to CS Cart in the New Year. They are launching a multi-store version which allows you as many front ends as you want with one order management system. With each store you can have a completely different design, different shipping, different pricing, different payment methods etc etc.

Cost is $600 for 3 stores and then $200 for each store front after that. Then surplus funds can be spent on making the store great and not astronomical support fees for a product that is dead.

A world away from ISC.

[Martin]

As things stand we'll be moving over to CS Cart in the New Year.

You got any pointers on the whole store layout/design aspect of things? That seemed to be the usual complaint with regard to CS Cart but as I've not found the time to look I've been wondering if it was just a case of lack of CSS skills or more specific to the code...

Thoughts please...

[CharlieFoxtrot]

This is gonna sound crazy maybe, but for now I'm sticking with my 6.1.1 Interspire Cart. But knowing there will not be any further development time put into it by Interspire, I'm going to feel a lot more free to hack it mercilessly.

There's no point in maintaining an 'upgrade path' for something that will never be getting one. Which means I can really do what I want with it without fear.

Not crazy at all! That's exactly where I stand with ISC v4.07 ~ Even with its lack of support and upgrade path, we've made too many changes to consider any other option right now. The process of re-modifying another cart to add the same functionality we've added to ISC is a bit daunting, so we'll just sit-tight and try to maximize the remaining value of our initial investment.

[busi6292]

ISC, particularly v6, still remains to be the most robust e-commerce software around inclusive of features. Regardless of service, we'll be sticking at least with them until the end of 2012 and may look at BigCommerce afterwards when they allow you to touch more of their code and API.

[Martin]

As things stand we'll be moving over to CS Cart in the New Year.

You got any pointers on the whole store layout/design aspect of things? That seemed to be the usual complaint with regard to CS Cart but as I've not found the time to look I've been wondering if it was just a case of lack of CSS skills or more specific to the code...

Thoughts please...

Jon?

[jonsam]

i like isc
if i was moving i would probably goto magento but when i look at the back end of the other sites i always prefer the look of isc
and it has 90 percent of the features i want and the other carts always have something missing

but i would like multi site backend cart but i think i will prob use a inventory management system and stick with a moded vers of isc

its a shame isc has been abandoned i think its a good product

i would never use a hosted system