Search the Community

I have been a web store owner for several years and have used zen-cart, opencart, magento, prestashop trying to build up a web shop. I only know some basic html and php programming skill. Now I would like to share my limited experience with some beginners who want to build up an onlne shop. Hope it is helpful to someone. The very first shop I tried to set up is this Sex Toy Wholesaler Store, with zen-cart 1.38a in 2009 on a shared hosting plan from BlueHost. At that time, zen-cart was a highly recommended platform. I was generally satisfied with it as it worked fine and received orders for us, eventhough the site did not look very nice. There was one serious problem with zen-cart when I used it: my site was hacked many times (now I think this was mainly due to the unsecured enough shared hosting)! I encountered opencart by coincidence after two years and a half or so and surprisingly found that this software was just way better looking than zen-cart. So I searched through internet for the comparison of major open source e-commerce software online and read a lot about this. I then switched the Sex Toy Wholesaler Store to opencart and was happier. Meanwhile, I still looked for other better alternatives and see if I could do better (Opencart did not offer rich SEO settings by default). I have tried prestashop and magento. Prestashop was really impressive as well. It provided a nice clean default theme and the SEO settings seemed to be sufficient. It also offered rich ajax feature, streamline one page checkout, abandoned cart reminder etc. And I really like it. However, as I spent more time testing prestashop (maybe not enough time as I feel that I am still not very familiar with it), I found its shopping cost setting really disappointed. Because I had to input more than 1,000 values to complete our shipping cost settings for different countries worldwide. I think prestashop is the best for those merchants who shipping cost calculation method is simple. And I might use it to build up another shop in the future. As for magento, it is really a masterpiece of e-commerce and I love it IF I HAD ENOUGH BUDGET! This boy just requires high end server hardware and better programming skill to run it well.