toyromance Posted February 4, 2014 Share Posted February 4, 2014 (edited) 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. Edited February 4, 2014 by toyromance (see edit history) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fzmcon Posted September 19, 2014 Share Posted September 19, 2014 I am struggling from Prestashop and Opencart. Can you give me any suggestion? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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