online shop

[JSR]

At the risk of dredging up an old thread, I took the plunge into OpenCart this week.

I've been using ZenCart for the last five years and it's served its purpose but, with the likelihood that the next upgrade will require a *lot* of work, I've been looking elsewhere. At the recommendation of this thread, I tried out OpenCart.

In comparison of the two, the first thing I can say is that OpenCart is significantly easier to set up. ZenCart has one heck of a lot of options in the back-end, but it's so disorganised that finding anything is a task in itself. You can be pretty sure that if you want it to do something it will be able to do it, but finding out how to do it is the chore.

OpenCart, however, has a much more simplified back-end. You can find what it can do much easier. Even though I've had to manually migrate my products and options, it wasn't an arduous task. Migrating my customer base took a little bit of fiddling with CSVs but that was also do-able.

The front-end of OpenCart, without custom template, is much more modern and fresh compared to ZenCart - ZenCart feels very antiquated in comparison.

I haven't yet got onto looking outside the envelope of OpenCart (I've only been using it for a week), so I don't know what trouble I might have customising the template or adding international shipping options or other couriers, but it looks like this might be an easier task than it was with ZenCart.

The only real downside with OpenCart is the same thing you get with all free solutions - support. Yes, there is a support forum but the developer of OpenCart doesn't appear to be the most sociable person around. If you have find a problem that doesn't directly affect the developer's use of OpenCart, he's not all that interested in working out a fix. If you're lucky, someone else may have run into the same problem and posted a fix but, if not, you're on your own.

I found a couple of "bugs" myself while setting OpenCart up. One such problem was that emails sent out by OpenCart would not display images in the emails when viewed with the Mozilla Thunderbird / Seamonkey email clients - or, in one case, the iPad email client. This problem has been discussed on the OpenCart forum, but the only replies tended to be "use a different email client" or "I see the images fine" from the developer. That's avoiding the problem, it's not a solution. I'm far from being a coder but I did eventually find the problems - and they were minor things. In one case a hyphen was missing deep within the code. In the other case, a slightly different bug in a different email code needed to be altered. I fixed those for myself and now it's working fine, but who else is going to wade through code for hours trying to find a solution? No one, judging by the posts of faults on the forum.

This is to be expected because OpenCart is still relatively new, and there is really just one person developing it. ZenCart has more people working on it, but it suffers from the "too many cooks" problem - too many people developing too many things leads to messy code and files all over the place. Your take your choice which issue you want.

My own choice for now is OpenCart because it doesn't seem to have stagnated in the way ZenCart has and, well, I see myself as a problem hunter/solver anyway. I hate hunting for bugs, but I love it when I solve the problem. I'd guess that not many of us are like that.

[smitch6]

welcome to the opencart world

[JSR]

Well, it took me long enough. :biggrin:

Will I regret it when I have to upgrade for the first time?

[MattP]

I am in the same boat as you JSR as I downloaded OpenCart the other day. It is my first time in using a shopping cart on my site. I am currently away with friends for the New Year but am trying to get online as much as possible so that I can start to adjust the template to how I want it. :biggrin:

[JSR]

am trying to get online as much as possible so that I can start to adjust the template to how I want it. :biggrin:

I decided the priority was to get it working first. Any template adjustment can be done later. The default OpenCart template isn't bad.

Also, I discovered with ZenCart that the more you modify things (including templates) the more work you end up having to do when you upgrade to the next version. You might want to bare that in mind.

[barryslip]

To those people using opencart....

Do you also use opencart to host your site, or another hosting company? If its opencart doing the hosting for you, how much do they charge? If its another hosting company, I assume that MySql or similar needs to be installed too?

[JSR]

To those people using opencart....

Do you also use opencart to host your site, or another hosting company? If its opencart doing the hosting for you, how much do they charge? If its another hosting company, I assume that MySql or similar needs to be installed too?

OpenCart is eshop code (software), not a hosting company. I can't speak for others but I host my sites on a VPS, so I just uploaded it like any other software.

If you have webspace, just check the minimum requirements before you upload the files to be sure you have what's required.

[MattP]

I decided the priority was to get it working first.

Thanks, I shall start testing when I get home on Wednesday. The company I use to host is Heart Internet and they have everything already setup for OpenCart use.

[barryslip]

To Smitch, JSR and MattP
I'm also thinking about opencart. What are your monthly hosting fees from your respective hosting companies??

[Paul]

My is £5.99 per year.