That is a common question that we get when clients call. There are so many shopping carts out there, it is hard to know which one to use for your web site. That is why we have written this article to help you know the advantages and disadvantages of each cart. We will be reviewing:

Magento Shopping Cart Review (Our Pick if you have a big web hosting budget - please see our review below)
Oscommerce Shopping Cart Review
CRE Loaded Shopping Cart Review (Our Pick)
Zen Cart Shopping Cart Review
X-Cart Shopping Cart Review
OSC Max Shopping Cart Review
Joomla & Virtuemart Shopping Cart Review (For CMS & Shopping Cart Combined)
E-commerce Shopping Cart Feature Comparison Chart

It is important to know when selecting your shopping cart what features you need. All the shopping carts below feature the following:

• Customer management
• Product management
• Variety of payment and shipping modules
• Order receipt emails
• Ability to use SSL secure layers for ordering process

However, the shopping carts vary when it comes to:

• Time it takes to modify the cart to look like a current web design
• WYSIWYG ability to modify product descriptions using different fonts, colors, etc.
• Ability to import/export from Excel spreadsheet
• Wholesale/Reseller Pricing

In this review we will be going over PHP/MySQL shopping carts that run both on Linux and Windows servers. We will not be reviewing pay-per-month shopping carts. We feel these offer less value because they have expensive monthly fees. Also, they usually do not allow access to the source code of the system or much customization of the shopping cart. The following shopping carts below are open-source, that you can modify the source code and customize the shopping cart to your needs.

Website: http://www.magentocommerce.com
Magento has just come out of beta to become the best new open source shopping cart system. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards, making it clean and easy to work with. Out of the box it supports all of the features and goodies you would ever need from a shopping cart.

Advantages +
+ Out of the box it has the most features such as Google Checkout, Order editing, Product import/export, and way to many more to list here
+ Has the cleanest coding of all of the shopping carts reviewed
+ Has an excellent templating system making it easy to upgrade

Disadvantages -
- It is the newest shopping cart so it has not been tested as much as the others for bugs. But they have designed it so that patches are easy to install.
- Modifying the cart can sometimes take longer since their coding style has a steeper learning curve than other shopping carts.
- BIGGIE - Right now the technical documentation is very limited, making it difficult to customize and modify the programming of Magento beyond doing graphical changes. In a few months time we expect that this will change.
- BIGGIE - Significant cost to host the platform and get decent performance. Magento is unusable in the shared hosting environment ($10/month type packages). It requires about $25+/month to host because you need a semi-dedicated VPS server. The only company we have found to have decent loading speeds while not costing $100/month is Crucial Web Hosting (A Magento partner). There hosting plan is $25/month.

website: http://www.oscommerce.com
Oscommerce is the basis for both Zen Cart and CRE Loaded. As such is it is simpler and does not have all of the contributions already added that Zen Cart and CRE Loaded do. It runs well though and is a good back to basics shopping cart.

Advantages +
+ Has the most available number of contributions and modifications
+ Recent security update brings it up to date with MySQL 5 and PHP 5

Disadvantages -
- It can take a lot of time and money to install all the contributions you want (add-ons)
- No graphic template system meaning it is harder to modify the design

website: http://www.creloaded.com
CRE Loaded is like Oscommerce but with many more contributions installed. Some of the nice contributions it has are Easy Populate which lets you populate your database from an Excel file, coupon codes, administrator access levels, template system, and an affiliate manager. CRE Loaded also has one of the Oscommerce templating systems installed which allows you to more easily integrate a design into the system and control which information boxes show on the left and right columns.

Advantages +
+ Well supported
+ Stable
+ Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed

Disadvantages -
- Contributions from Oscommerce.com can be more difficult to install, but CRE Loaded has many of its own already converted
- Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed

Additional Information
CRE Loaded comes in 3 verisons. The regular version is free. The Pro version adds better product attribute support and credit card encryption, and the B2B version adds seperate pricing level support.

website: http://www.zen-cart.com
Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. You can not install contributions directly from the Oscommerce web site onto Zen Cart. Some of the nice features include product attributes managers, template system, html editor for regular web page contents, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more. An issue with Zen Cart right now is the Easy Populate contribution which would let you import products from an Excel sheet does not work yet. So if you need this feature we recommend the other shopping carts.

Advantages +
+ No licensing fees
+ Stable
+ Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed
+ Nicer looking default designs pre-installed

Disadvantages -
- not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, they must be converted to Zen Cart
- Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed

website: http://www.x-cart.com
X-Cart is a commercial package, but one of the most competitively priced and easy to modify.

Advantages +
+ Commercially supported and has very few if any bugs
+ Uses Smarty Templates system which many programmers like to work with for laying out the web site

Disadvantages -
- Licensing fees (figure $800 + in just licensing fees not including any web development)

website: http://www.oscdox.com
OSC Max is an excellent version of Oscommerce that has many useful contributions installed. It is just as easy to use in the admin as the default Oscommerce installation.

Advantages +
+ No licensing fees
+ The contributions installed are very useful
+ Has wholesale/Reseller pricing module already installed
+ Well-documented

Disadvantages -
- Has some buggy code in certain areas

website: http://virtuemart.net
Installing and configuring Joomla & Virtuemart together was a snap. On the Virtuemart website they have a combined installer that installs Virtuemart with Joomla. This is the solution you would want if you have to have your CMS (Content Management System) combined with your shopping cart. Joomla we feel is the best CMS out there, but Virtuemart on the other hand is not the best shopping cart system. It is not a bad one though, it is just not as fully featured as the other solutions.

Overall we would say that Virtuemart is about equal with default Oscommerce, but not the loaded versions of Oscommerce: Zen Cart & CRE Loaded.

Advantages +
+ Easy to install
+ Combines well with the best CMS Joomla
+ Has the basic shopping cart features

Disadvantages -
- Lacks a lot of high-end shopping cart features
- Not as many add-on modules available

This feature comparison chart compares the out of the box features of each cart. Sometimes a cart will have an available add-on module to install the feature listed.

 

If you decide to go with an Oscommerce based shopping cart, we recommend that you start with one of the loaded versions - Zencart, CRE Loaded, or OSCmax - in order to save you lots of money on installing additional modules to the plain Oscommerce version. You can then use your development money to put in your own custom modifications, design, etc. rather than installing all of the basics.

We like Magento but recommend that you wait to use it until they optimize more its speed, and provide better documenation for developers. If you decide to go with Magento, make sure to chose a fast enough web host. As we mentioned, it does not run fast enough on most shared hosting plans.