Just Bliss!

Ive been meaning to get one of these lists out for a while now, so bear with me. It could take some time.

After receiving my weekly dose of motivation via her email from Sarah Bray (check out her site), I have decided to allocate the 15 mins or so to get through one of the things on my “list of things to do, that isn’t really a just something that I feel needs doing but can never fit it in” list. You will enjoy it. You will.

I’ve been designing, maintaining and working on websites for many years now, I’m some what of a website engineer prehaps. Working my way through design, CSS and marketing to have a broad coverage of skills, knowledge and understanding. That and I like designing things and making websites.

In my time ive tried a number of so called ecommerce systems, however rarely have I ever enjoyed ‘using’ them.

Top 5 Website Shopping Cart Systems

Here’s the list in no perticular order.

• OSCommerce (Open Source)
• Magento (Open Source)
• Tiger Commerce
• 1and1 Shop Designer
• Actinic

So what are the pros and cons of each, which is good, whats bad, what what what.

OSCommerce
www.oscommerce.co.uk

With this system you better be prepared to either know alot about styling, or get ready to hire someone to design and update the shop for you. It’s open source and it’s absolutely horrendus, there is no easy way to have a nice looking, sucessful and up-to-date  website with this. Alot of design companies are still using this software or reselling it with alot of work put in behind it. Some might know what they are looking for but the code and idea behind it has long been left behind by competition.

Some might argue that it got the ecommerce world up and running or at least has been a leader, but maybe that’s because of how long it takes to get a decent looking shop from one of these installs.

• Outdated
• Needs to be hosted somewhere
• Hard to manipulate
• Buggy as hell

5 Out Of 10 Stars

Magento Ecommerce
www.magentoecommerce.co.uk

Magento had a rare opportunity to kick OSCommerce out of the water, a fresh product with a hell of alot of features behind it, coupled with a extensively well designed backend and coding structure. Being open source however it means the team behind it has been some what slack in answering its communities desires. The cart itself will work out of the box and can be saturated with themes and styles. A compitent designer / css styles person would be able to turn a good looking website out from one of these installs.

However the install is one of the large factors people have issues with to start with, some hosting companies have a setup prefab which they will install for you to get off the ground. The next hurdle this cart faces is the constant, and somewhat useless upgrading it receives. Each new version seems to bring in more problems, more features but never and fixes to problems that have existed for months and for some, years. Most users have given up trying to update their versions due to never knowing if the upgrade will completely obliterate their websites functionality. I know I don’t bother now, after an accidental “all clear” upgrade and having to redesign and rebuild my entire shop..

This one could have had more potential behind it, but lacks free support, the company behind it appear to have made it notoriously difficault so they can sell their support at premium rate.

• Fresh and New
• Lots of Features
• Features that don’t work
• Updates are too risky

6 Out Of 10 Stars

Tiger Commerce Website Shop
www.tigercommerce.co.uk

Well this one is something that stands out as something quite special! It’s hosted for you, you just need a domain to make it more popular, and it comes with a 7 day free trial.

That’s something you dont get from most normal web companies let alone something as powerful as this website shop. I’ve given this trial ago and im pleased to say its pretty damn easy, idiot proof infact. Everything is where you expect it to be, its a hosted solution so you just pay the monthly price for it and you’re away. It has a range of payment gateways built in to enable them, looks to have been developed with some form of SEO in mind too.

One thing that caught my eye was just how much you can change from the ‘design studio’ it allows you to change the layout but keeps the structure, you can upload your own background image, logo, colour changing, box changing. They also have a service which you can if you wanted to, just pay to have their design team to style your website for you, yeah its an upsell but the quality of service and work blows the previous systems out of the water.

Sure it could do with some more features, but the ones that are there are great!

• Easy to use
• Updates are automatic
• Tons of features
• Ready to use in about 30 mins
• Free trial

8.5 Out Of 10 Stars

1 and 1 Shop Designer
1and1.co.uk

There isnt realy much to say about this one, its a simple, very simple website shop that 1and1 have somehow convinced an unfortunate few that it is ecommerce. The pages it produces are restrictive and make the website look at least 10 years old. I cant see very much use from it, and it doesnt seem very user friendly.

Not something I would recommend to anyone, even a beginner. You could do more by building a website with front page and putting paypal buttons on it. Yeah sure its a hosted package but the package is too spread thin and limited.

• Limited
• Poor Design Options
• Pretty much just lacking ‘anything’

3 Out Of 10 Stars

Actinic 7
www.actinic.co.uk

Wow, don’t even get me started. I’ve recently had to try and add some google analytics code to this. After having to remotely connect the client’s computer (because the shop works by having everything offline.. then uploading it, no i dont know why) you then have to hunt around the most confusing of GUI to edit some text files. The whole thing looks like it was built in visual basic, it doesnt seem to do anything fancy, or support any ground breaking features, or any useful features. I cannot express how you should try to avoid it, save yourself a headache or fifty.

• Just urgh..

2 Out Of 10 Stars

I am trying to be as non biast as I can, as I have a shop that runs with magento but this has taken me months of refining back and forth, huge backups and having to start again multiple times, it isnt for the faint hearted, but prehaps if you’re a die hard developer give it a look over, I honestly think for value for money / time to selling Tiger Commerce is something you want to try.

It’s so simple, if you’ve got an Ebay shop or something it’s the next logical step along, no messing about and you pretty much get it for what you would host it for anyway.