I have recently been looking for a good e-commerce solution for a web design client and have had the opportunity to go through several of the most popular ones that I could find through Google. I was looking for a solution that was open source, preferably in PHP and MySQL and that was standards compliant.

It was also important to have a product that was expandable so I could add features easily to it for this client and any others that would need a shopping cart. I wasn’t looking for a shopping cart solution that would require hacks to get it where I needed it but something that would be as flexible as the web design business demands.

Looking for open source and flexibility

It can be hard to find solutions like this and after several shopping cart installs I thought it was going to be impossible to find, like searching for a buried treasure in the search results. More importantly it needed to have a straight-forward templating system that wouldn’t restrict the design in any way and allow me to directly integrate the client’s design into the shopping cart with no sign of the shopping cart being a separate system from the normal web site.

However I did find several solutions that worked well and almost did the job but they were all mostly lacking in some of the areas but they would work for most if they didn’t have such a high demand for quality, extendability and flexibility as I do for my clients. I did find one, however, that is a perfect fit and we are in the process of adding modules on to it for different features that the client needs. I will list these in reverse order with our final choice being the last-listed product.

Top 3 open source shopping cart solutions that I tested

osCommerce (www.oscommerce.com)

This product is probably the most popular open source shopping cart available and used. It has a ton of features and is very easy to install. However, the biggest problem I ran into with it was it’s lack of separation from code and markup. Not only did it not have any separation what-so-ever but it uses tables for everything. In some cases font tags and in-line style elements. As a web designer, it is nearly impossible to work in those conditionsâ�� especially if you can’t separate all the bad markup from the PHP.

Even with it’s faults and awful markup the feature set will usually work for most users of this system. It has extensive documentation and has been around for 6 years (hence the tables and font tags). They currently boast having over 155,000 store owners and developers worldwide that are using and contributing to the product.

The templating system in osCommerce works pretty well but due to some of the output code it can be very difficult to get it to fit into every web site. There are probably modules that will strip out all of the HTML so you can just have the necessary products output but we spent too much time on it trying to get rid of nasty tables and decided to search for an alternative.

ZenCart (www.zencart.com)

This shopping cart has a lot of features and is much better organized in the admin then osCommerce. It is standards compliant and uses divs instead of tables where it can. The templating system was a little bit better then osCommerce in that it didn’t output quite as much markup from it’s token objects. However, it looks like ZenCart is simply a cleaned up version of osCommerce but with a lot more features added, possibly with modules integrated in that were made for osCommerce. While I can’t be sure that this is what they did it is definitely what it looks like.

We really liked that it had such an organized admin and so many features available for us to use, the only problem is the age-old problem of sacrificing usability for butt-loads of features. While they are organized enough for us to discern easily what we need to do and where we need to go to do it. There are a lot of features that would confuse clients and that many options seems unnecessary. There are a ton of menu items with hundreds of sub-menu items. It is very un-zen.

We felt that clients would be confused about all of the options available and we would sacrifice a lot of project-time explaining how to use the admin system that wouldn’t be worth it to our client or to us.

OpenCart (www.opencart.com)

I came across OpenCart on my search adventure and really like their web site for starters, it was simple and easy to use. It looks like a designer actually made the site and not the programmers. Which is a big difference when it comes to finding a product for me. The OpenCart shopping cart is XHTML 1.0 standards compliant and has an intuitive templating system that is very similar to Smarty. It has inherit separation of markup and programming which is a huge deal, it really speeds up the process of integrating this shopping cart into a site.

It also had a module-based system that allowed for adding any product features that we needed easily, so if there was a feature that it didn’t have it was easy to create one and add it directly into the shopping cart admin.

By default it only comes with the option to pay by check/money order or Paypal but with their developer network there was a readily available module to add on that would allow us to use Authorize.net so we could process payments by credit card easily within the system.

It does have the ability to use whichever form of payment whether pounds or dollars which are the most popular and there are modules available for other currency as well. It also has lots of different language support modules available for just about any country.

With the templating system you can skin the admin as well as the front end easily using simple tokens to place within your design. The output is extremely easy-to-use xHTML that mostly consist of divs and lists all with assigned class names that allow you to style as specifically as you need.

The admin system is very easy to use with large icon-based navigation and tabbed configuration setting to change anything you need. It doesn’t have a confusing series of menus that are hard to navigate but a very simple and straight forward naming scheme that makes finding what you need very easy. You can assign multiple catagories to products and an image for the product category as well as multiple images per a product.

Currently OpenCart is in version .7 with 1.0 coming out very soon and potential adding a related products module as well as a group pricing system to allow different price points for different customers. It is also looking like it will come out with auto aliasing of URLs and possibly the ability to do dynamic shipping based on area to shipping address calculations.

The conclusion of searching for an e-commerce solution

So for anyone looking for an open source shopping cart that is standards compliant, flexible and very extendable that is standards compliant. My vote goes for OpenCart.

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