What ecommerce solution do you use?

[dhigbee]

Hi All,

I am in the process of reevaluating ecommerce programs to offer my customers. To date, all the shopping cart programs I have written are custom to the clients needs. I need something off the shelf that requires very litle customization (or easy to customize) and the average user/customer can easily maintain. I am opening this thread in hopes of getting your feedback and suggestions of what is good and what to stay away from.

Please share with myself, and others who are interested, what software/programs you are using to support ecommerce needs; shopping carts, credit card processing, etc. Please also add any comments you may have as to what are the positives and negatives of your software/programs of choice.

I look forward to to everyones input.

Don

[wunderlin]

I 'purchased' mini-cart for $2.50 then rewrote 90% of it for a fully custom solution. It works great, since I was already a payflowlink customer from Verisign.

http://www.bodyaccessories.com/payflow_link/

Payflow link is nice for small-business transacations- reasonably priced, but you still have to go through the pain of acquiring a merchant account, etc. The advantage is that the processing fees are minimized compared to 3rd party processors.

[charlie]

OSCommerce (http://www.oscommerce.com)

completely open source. rivals many commercial software and has tons of contributions made by the community for all sorts of customizations and add ons.

Problem? Doesn't have a very good template and theme system. I suggest you make as many changes necessary as possible before loading any product or other data. Customizations are generally made directly through code changes and is not modular.

If you want something very simple and functional, try AGORA

[dhigbee]

Thanks for getting back to me guys.

I have osCommerce installed right now and it will work as a solution for now. The part I fear is the customization requirements the average user has to do to get the cart looking the way they want. I really wish they would integrate templates a bit better. Another problem with osCommerce is that there are still quite a few bugs in it and the team is very slow in issuing fixes and updated releases. Kind of makes me worried about the future of the project. But, you may have noticed, SB uses it.

I looked at what Verisigns solution has to offer as I have a design customer who uses them. It would take a lot of work to get it where I would want.

Does any one else have a solution in place they would like to share? I have to think there are more of you out there who use a shopping cart program.

Don

[dconderm]

does simply using the paypal.com sytem count? That is what i have used for anyone that wants to sell something.

--dan