Free Fast and Pretty - which shopping cart?
This is a note of all the shopping carts that are free & pretty, to install automatically on a site.A site the uses a database is going to take time to install and backup; it's easier if there is an installer like these. The shopping carts run on Wordpress, Joomla or Drupal, or more simply are called shopping carts and download as a single thing.
- fantastico scroll-down to E-Commerce for a list of shopping carts
- softulicious Softulicious shopping carts
- installatraon Installatron ecommerce and business apps
With luck, a super-fast super-cheap hosting company will have a version of one of these three script installers free for customers to use on its control panel, ready do install shopping-cart software with a single click.
My fast site is on a server chosen from webperf.net and test ones are on hostinger.co.uk or x10hosting.co.uk who allow 2 database sites per account. You can see what I want to change away-from at my shoe shop here.
Promising shopping cart software is red. I have 2 F-words & 4 P-words for whittling-down choice.
Free, Fast & Pretty; Postage, Payment, & Product management are essential too.
Product management sub-divides into another five points to whittle-down the shortlist.
http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/images/articles/ecommerce-shopping-carts.jpg puts shopping cats into categories, with this category at the top - known for being free, but without hosting or customer support and known for being harder to set-up than a hosted shopping cart.
There's a separate bit about hosting at the bottom titled "Hosting: Webperf.net"
Free
The cost is hidden in the price of modules. Open-source ought to be cheaper I guess, as well as being a prettier idea to deal with than something corporate. I don't want to pay so-much-a-month for a hosted service like Shopify or Bigcommerce. I haven't read that they're better than self-installed software; the same money could pay for developers to help you install. And if I can't pay bills, then Shopify and Bigcommerce put up a sign saying "closed". Self-hosted software can go on a slow free server like Byethost and leave me with just the cost of the domain to pay-for until business picks-up or the firm is sold or I run the firm down gracefully or my health recovers or I get back out of prison or whatever the next stage might be. (Joke: I am not in prison)Fast
Not that I know of any measurements, but Magento gets bad reviews for this compared to Prestashop (I haven't googled the others for speed tests recently that I can remember)Trying to re-check this fact with a quick google in July 2017, the first result puts Magento ahead in the US and Prestashop in Europe.
https://blog.aheadworks.com/fastest-ecommerce-platform/
So the test is not to put two similara set-ups on one server, one using Magento and one Prestashop. It is to test a number of other peoples' shops on whatever server they happen to use, and of course some firms throw money at the problem and have super-fast servers. The second test puts Prestashop behind as well with the same measuring system
https://www.quanta-computing.com/best-e-commerce-platform-performance/
This one is confident that on the same host, Prestashop does better and that it can work better on cheaper hosts; it's less bloated. No facts are quoted to back this up.
https://www.mavenecommerce.com/blog/magento-vs-prestashop/
This review seems pretty sure why PS should be faster, even if it can't explain very well
https://www.go-gulf.ae/blog/magento-prestashop-comparison/
This one says "small e-shops get-on very well with Prestashop" under "performance"
https://community.1and1.com/comparison-of-prestashop-and-magento/
This review puts Prestashop ahead, and rates some paid-for software even faster
https://selfstartr.com/ecommerce-platforms/
There are some videos to check and some reviews mentioning Open Cart alongside.
There is a bit about hosting at the bottom of the page as well.
Pretty
Not that I know of any measurements, but the ones with "specials" on the front page of the demonstration are always ugly for some reason.Postage = shipping
I want to sell in as many countries of the world as possible with cheap and greenish postage. I don't want software from a developer who says "use the Fedex module, UPS, or role your own with this bit of rubbish I provide. Or search the forum in case another shopkeeper sorted this problem ten years ago for a previous version".The developers who say this are so over-paid that they don't even use the post office to buy mail-order T shirts in their native USA. Post offices are usually cheaper and greener because they have a delivery round to most letterboxes on a street rather than one in my street and another a few streets or miles away. Post offices are usually public sector and not geared to writing free plugins for Posh-o-cart. So anyone paid under a zillion pounds a year ought to know that plugins for different post offices, or to help shopkeepers write their own plugins for post offices, are essential for promoting shopping cart software.
Royal Mail has 4 postal zones of UK, Europe, Airmail, and Oceana with various different services that change in price. My next post is a guide to Royal Mail's main services for individuals & small-scale e-commrece trading. I want to offer a simplified version that has a basic price per weight or price per weight to each of these zones, or at least to three out of the four. 2nd class to the UK. Probably standard rate to the rest of the world. This should not be much to ask but most shopping cart software fails the test - including all or most of the Wordpress plugins and including the one written in the UK I think. Here is something about Drupal shipping modules and here is something else and another thing. The developers get carried-away thinking about US taxes while ignoring worldwide postage.
Payment.
I want to use paypal for testing and then my merchant service provider - Elavon - for most real orders. If I get enough real orders I hope to shop-around merchcant service providers, but you can't haggle if you don't have the turnover, can you? No. We agree. And I do not want to pay a hundred pounds for the privilage of using the merchant service provider I am already signed-up to. Luckily this is getting a lot easier than it was a few years ago and some shopping carts do fit free Elavon modules.Products.
If the top few points are OK then I'll play with the site and see if it can tell me things I want to know about stock, like♦ whether an advert helped a product sell. Remote-hosted checkout forms are bad for this - they confuse the tracking code.
♦ whether a product has run-out.
If my software refuses to sell a sold-out product, then maybe it can automatically charge a customer at each purchase and save me a job.
♦ when to re-order. This can only be a prompt, but still a useful one and I'm not sure how subtle the different stock control systems are or how to use them. Maybe they're add-ons. One version of Prestashop can even remember where a product is usually found in the warehouse and write that on a picking sheet. I don't know if that's the free version.
♦ I'll have to learn the system for attributes = sizes as well. Some programs track a shoe as something that can be adapted to different sizes, as though these were like different sorts of laces. Others track a shoe as a range of several different products, one for each size, but sharing a supplier. I'll learn as I go. Presumably most software offers both options as a shoe in one size definately can't be re-sized to another, even with a broom handle and lots of leverage.
♦ I want to search for products in several ways - whether my shoes are made in a democratic welfare state for example, or how well that country scores on a democracy index. Some shopping carts just have a tag for brand which they mis-label "manufacturer".
Afterthoughts:
♦ I want any blogs and other bits to be part of the same web site if possible, as Drupal allows and possibly carts that can be slotted-in to other sites. Perhaps Cubecart.
♦ I want to have a wholesale shop and maybe some others using the same software and looking different to the end-customer, while a supplier might want to share my shop so it looks the same to the end-customer but stuff is sent from another place. So carts with the word "multi" in them would be good.
Avactis.com/pricing/
Not quite open source?Paid-for version has a bundle of modules including language translation and a "custom" mobile version.
Abantecart
http://www.abantecart.com/shopping-cart-demopromising
http://www.abantecart.com/ecommerce-documentation/admin-user-manual/specific-manuals/stock-processing-configurations suggests it can track stock of each variation of a product. My problem is uptdating it. Two trial installations have both got stuck updataing from version X to version X+1.
Allegrocart
Alegrocart.com/demoUgly. The developer is also a car and car parts dealer in Canada, so the program should be well set-up for that trade.
Agoracart
Agoracart.com/demos.htmUnusual in being based on perl rather than php. Long established. Available through one of my web host accounts on a special menu for Perl scripts, but not on the other. Ugly.. Is it fast? I have not tested the thing or installed.
Axis
Part of a hugely corporate suite of programs sold from Amercia. This software is presented as open source. It installs OK from a script installer but I haven't found the admin logon to test it at all. I haven't found a demo site.CS cart
Cs-cart.com/demo-item.htmlFast and pretty with smooth back-end data for shopkeepers, it says of itself.
One installer doesn't include it.
One installer includes it, but when I try to install I get "licencing mode"; the program doesn't seem to be open source and has a free version or a $385 version.
Cubecart
Cubecart.com/demoPromising. More to follow. The developer pays UK tax that benefits me, and has no private equity funding, so he probably knows what a post office is. (Amazon and Starbucks are loosing customers in the UK for their failure to pay tax, which is great. Sod them) Getting back to shopping carts, Canadapost and United States Postal Service have free modules. Royal Mail has to be dealt with through the all-in-one module which I have used to set-up zones.
vimeo.com/cubecart instructions in 5 short videos.
Nifty but murky system for stock control of products which are sizes or other attrubutes of a type of product. A forum post suggests that the minimum and maximum stock levels show on the front of the site.
I haven't yet found-out how to get a table display of stock of each size of each product. As with most ecommerce systems, the forum has a small membership but can provide good answers.
As I write the new open source version of this product has just been updated to include cache modules for speed of download and so higher search engine rankings and easier buying for visitors. So this is an up-and-coming version of a long established product.
Drupal Commerce
http://demo.commerceguys.com/You can now install Drupal from something like Installatron and the instructions for adding shopping cart modules are getting better. I tried Ubercart in about 2012.. It needed a shipping module. At that point the developers left, so there is still no shipping module. The developers wrote Drupal Commerce, which has neither a good Royal Mail shipping module nor a way of connecting products on the admin database to products on the front-end. You have to enter them twice or install some kind of module for doing it. I tried it in 2013-14. The customers are exepected to be developers and the support takes the form of videos by people who don't say how they have set-up their demonstration before the video started, so you can follow it to the letter and find that your lack of something-or-other stops it working for you. You can see transcripts of the videos and links to them as earlier posts on this blog. Commerce Guys, developers, have received $7.3bn of private equity finance so they haven't heard of the post office except as a potential client - they haven't heard of it as a place where you post parcels. A pity because at first glance they look good people to write free software. It's just the way they're set-up that doesn't suit open source shopping carts for small business, and not enough people have found a way to jump-in and fill the gap of writing software cheaply or for free to help small shopkeepers on Drupal. My next post https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2015/06/a-tourist-guide-to-royal-mail-and-small.html might encourage.
Magento
Magento.com/explore/demoSlow. Reviews state that the extra features are at the expense of a multi-layered slow database structure.
https://veg-buildlog.blogspot.com/2012/01/building-awesome-e-commerce-site-in-25.html for example
A review says that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smarty smarty templates are hard to learn-about too.
For all the money spent on this huge bundle of code, I don't see any great ease of use over other similar programs. I tried to train my Magento to recognise shoe sizes in my particular way. I even got hold of a textbook to train me in how to train Magento. On page 72 if gets difficult. I could probably have cracked it in the end and learned how to add my particular attributes to products, but I got bored of page 72 and then read reviews about bloat and slow loading.
Mals-e.com/featuresChart.php
Much liked by enthusiasts including me for ten years or so because it is free and stable, but it is also a shopping cart on a remote website that allows you to write order buttons that you can stick on your web site. In other words it is limited. I want to stop using Mal's because I want to link my orders to a stock control system. I also want a stock layout system that shows a shop window of my products with order buttons next to them, in some slick way that also works on mobiles an tablets and any other format that people invent over the years, and has some of the bells and whistles like better tracking of advert performance or slick one-page checkout on the same url. I don't want to loose the ability to rabbit-on like someone who always wanted to be a journalist. This makes my site easier to index. So, ideally, I will be able to keep a lot of text on the new more formatted site.If there are ways of hosting one or two shopping carts with different urls but access to the same stock, that's unlikely to happen but worth thinking about. Mal's allows me to sell to a trade customer at 50% discount, and we would probably have met and found a way to work-around some of the limitations. It doesn't provide that trade buyer, or me, with a way of knowing what is in stock or anything like that, so it's better suited to goods I make than goods I buy in batches and sell-on.
Did you know that there is a $35 program for making shop sites with stock control out of an Excel spreadsheet? It can use Mal's for checkout. Xlecom.com. Another one called Rapidcart doesn't use Mals.
Opencart
demo.opencart.comdemo.opencart.com/admin/index.php (type "demo" in both boxes to log in)
Promising at first. There is a Royal Mail module free. (post about Royal Mail here)
The installer provides an old version, but a new one can be unzipped on a hard disc, stripped of two files that have "config" in the names, and moved with a file transfer program to my server over the top of the old files.
Much praised by reviewers.
I've had a couple of bad days trying to make it accept stock, mock orders, categories, attributes, or shipping details - anything really. One online suggestion is that installing a module can trigger a loss of editing privilages which can be restored by ticking various boxes. I have done so. No joy.
Googling "Opencart Faults" I find a review on a site called techchattr.com that doesn't like the code. As I know nothing abut code, I rely on the review. Another on a site called websynn.com which likes the code but says it doesn't work for upgrades, which comes to the same thing. I think a free service needs to be solid because of course there's no technical support
Thirtybees Prestashop
This is the one I went with. Search engines will find you comparisons of Thirtybees and Prestashop, and a long list of reasons why you should never stick with Prestashop if you have a choice. They remain open source but the company that employs their 4 developers employs about 180 other people, all funded by flogging modules that you wouldn't need if the thing worked in the first place. Prestashop user forums show threads years-old about problems that could be fixed with a few lines of code. And the latest Prestashop 1.7 charges you $60 for a sitemap module that was included for free in version 1.6. Even 1.6 needed a free module for you to tweak the code - such as the style sheet - from the software's own control panel, or to add blog pages. Free modules were rather hard to find among a cacophony of modules from £44 upwards that they try to flog from your own control screens on the back of the program. From a staff point of view, the main developers have left the organisation and those who still work for it give it bad reviews on glassdoor.
Thirtybees is free, faster than Prestashop, and pretty with its new Niara theme. I might be able to use it without a single paid module, given a lot of style sheet hacks to compact the one page checkout. That's not as hard to do as it sounds; you can see how to do it on their "tips and tricks" page. Installation is easy on Softulicious or Fantastico, but not Installatron; it's worth changing hosts to get Softulicious or Fantastico if you want to experiment and make a lot of fresh installations. The software is slightly too large to install on Byethost and I don't know of free hosting that installs it easily, but it runs well on paid shared hosting that costs me £25 a year.
Stripe and Paypal payment modules are available free.
Countries are zoned, so that you can tell the software by hand that European 2kg parcels cost £10, worldwide £15 and UK (create a zone for it) £3. That's Royal Mail 2kg parcels done, without any extra module.
The future looks promising. Thirtybees is run as a sideline by a few developers who make their living doing-up web sites for Thirtybees and Prestashop customers. Very good developers, you discover if they happen to help on a forum. They aim to fix every reported bug and have worked through dozens left-over from Prestashop. This is a slightly precarious way for something to keep going and they welcome donations of help or money, but it does mean that there's no payroll to fund from up-selling; no loan from venture capitalists who need a return, and it's in Thirtybees' interest to fix problems instead of leaving them broken and selling modules to cover-up the mistake.
Spree Commerce
https://spreecommerce.com/accountNot on the installer systems for either of my web hosts.
Uses software I'm even less used-to than PHP, called Ruby.
Mentioned here because used by Bonobo - site that sells $100 jeans in the USA - and their main man makes a lot of videos about the how and the why - https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Andy+Dunn%22+Bonobos&tbm=vid - so if you use Spree Commerce you are well-placed to follow his advice about how to get a picture of the product on the shopping cart to reassure the customer or whatever other idea he tells us and his video camera about. He's a bit like a private dentist. He talks in a very relaxed, re-assuring way, and ends by charging $100. I don't know how to install Spree Commerce or want to learn more about software than necessary so I haven't used it.
Tomatocart
Tomatocart.com/products/store-demo.htmlMentioned by reviewers and available on installatron.
Multi-zone table-rate shipping is a freebie with a thread of comments and requests on their forum.
With luck that can be adapted to Royal Mail.
Payment is not available for free via paypal or elavon. The forum has lots of comments about far-eastern payment methods but not about European ones.
Ubercart - the Drupal Add-on
Ubercart.org/demo_livetest non-working demo...can be installed fairly quickly by someone who is used to cutting-and-pasting the right module links into the module adding bit of a Drupal admin page. A year or so ago, the ubercart site was covered in spam and any attempts to get shipping zones easy to use for the UK looked unlikely. Now the Ubercart site is up to date and there is a Royal Mail zones module, so maybe something will come of this. My first attempt was bogged-down in attempts to classify the whole world into Royal Mail shipping zones, which are described by a different set of country names to the ISO list, on a web table that says "others" are in World Zone 1. There is now a module that claims to classify countries by Royal Mail rules. After installing it and thinking it did not work for a few weeks, I discovered that you have to tick the "User Interface" boxes to enable user interfaces of every likely module. Rules I think is the crucual one. Then a set of extra rules make themselves known when you start trying to define them for other shipping modules, starting with "country is in royal mail zone".
There is also now a global shipping module that allows you to put all the the world's countries into different empires and then set prices to post to each, which is a lot better than things were, but the older tablequote module has been abandoned. As I look at message boards online, I think I may not be the only one to have trouble getting Global Shipping Module to do what I want, but it's hard to pin-down why.
Wordpress
...add-ons were un-finished last time I tried them in about 2014. They were presented as free with the most basic functions like postage modules costing £50 extra, and then card processing £50 extra, and then something else again, with nothing at the end of it beyond what you can get for free on hosted shopping carts: the functions were basic. This is a quote from Jigoshop about their free postage options "allows you to set five levels of weight-based shipping fees for your products. Simply set the upper limit for each required level, with the fee for that weight range, and those fees will then be enabled. If you require more complexity or want to have shipping rates automatically updated in near real time from your shipping provider, please check out our other Jigoshop Shipping extensions." I liked the customers - Wordpress is aimed at part timers - but not the software. I tried the traditional product from Instinct Entertainment - a wonderful name, and a new one based in the UK then woocommrece which is a fork of it. I tried these things about 2014 when there seemed to be too many wordpress shopping carts trying to make a living for too many developers. Things may have moved-on since, and the Jigoshop web site's history page says that it's run by part-timers. In contrast my last cart provideer, Mals-e commerce, provides one living to a developer, no support, no office landlord, and a solid system that doesn't break down.X-cart
http://www.x-cart.com/shopping-cart-demo.html
http://demostore.x-cart.com/admin/admin.php?target=login
I wasn't sure at first whether this was open source, and how easily if could be used with Drupal. Kiril Marinkov of their sales team helped by writing this.
X-Cart Classic(4.x) http://www.x-cart.com/pricing.html and our newI find that X-cart doesn't install automatically on my fast server or my free server. There is a new one click install for my hard disk, but it has crashed two or three times trying to install itself.
X-Cart 5 platform http://www.x-cart.com/software_pricing.html are and have always been fully open code. Yes, there are encrypted modules for X-Cart Classic(4.x) created by 3-rd party developers. However for X-Cart 5 we do not accept encrypted modules of any kind to the marketplace.
The core of all X-Cart 5 packages is exactly the same. Higher packages just add extra modules and thus extra features. You can use the Free package for as long as you wish, as it does not have any limitations in terms of the number products, customers or anything else. And you can, of course, add features via stand-alone free and commercial modules http://www.x-cart.com/extensions/addons or create your own: http://kb.x-cart.com/display/XDD/Developer+docs
And speaking about integration with Drupal, we do have the module that lets you insert X-Cart elements straight into Drupal http://www.x-cart.com/extensions/addons/drupal-connector.html That said, with the latest update the module has been deprecated. However if you wish, I suppose we would be able to provide you with the code base to create your own integration.
If you come up with any additional questions I'll be glad to answer them.
On the other hand, Drupal installs automatically and I've done similar installations to X-cart's before, with far worse instructions, so this is worth a try.
Zencart
https://www.softaculous.com/demos/Zen_CartI've not looked at this. It's a descendant of OSCommerce apparently.
Hosting: Webperf.net
Good hosting is another way to speed-up a site. This probably deserves a page to itself, but the only comparison page I could find for web host speed was one sponsored by the top performer that asks the others to pay for inclusion. Webperf.net . Smaller newer hosts tend to do well because they have less customers per rented server, I guess, and then when the web performance goes down they drop-out of the scheme.I worked down the list from the top, looking for a the first very cheap one. I found LChost at £50 a year plus vat and domain, but they have dropped-off the webperf testing site since. These are some jottings
Netcetera £36 ? VAT 5/80 GB ten and a bit.
http://www.webhostchat.co.uk/general-chit-chat-discussion/16175-speed-test-2.html says ignore number one in the charts - it’s a rigged result.
http://www.webhostchat.co.uk/general-chit-chat-discussion/16175-speed-test-2.html says ignore number one in the charts - it’s a rigged result.
Hub Network Service - no cheap shared hosting - four to six speed
Xilo - cheap hosting page is a blank white screen -
Good1 - four to five nearly six - you have to ask them for a price - hobbyist
Fluent.ltd.uk - - £120 a year for a small web site - four and a bit to five and a bit speed - telehouse
LChost were three and a bit till November 2016 then kaput . Don't use them for domain hosting as well as web hosting in case they block-out the bit of cpanel that lets you move your domain to another provider. If you get into this situation, Penguin-uk.net are good at extracting the domain name.
Fido.net 5/2/5 £59 five and a bit speed recently
My next post is a tourist guide to Royal Mail for e-commrece developers who don't live in the UK and don't know the basic services
Veganline.com for vegan boots made in the UK
Vegan shoes boots belts and jackets mainly made in the UK: not shoe shop shopping cart software, but the shoe shop of someone who wrote this blog because bad at choosing itJohn Robertson sells vegan shoes boots belts and jackets online at Veganline.com. Feel free to share with the social sharing buttons below
