There are many, many, many options out there, but I still couldn’t settle with one. Ones that looks nice to me so far include wordpress getshopped, opencart and magento. But they all need to install and configure and try out for many different features, which I still don’t even know if I’m going to need or not. That is the “solution” part of my question, since I’ll also need a host able to handle it and, preferably, supporting the platform updates.
Features I do need are:
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a ticket system (which opencart sure doesn’t have built in), so I can customize a custom made product for instance, and;
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a customizable user interface, as easy and as much as possible. In here I like to take squarespace as an example. Really easy to customize. In fact, it would be great if the shopping cart would offer similar drag n’ drop features.
I don’t care if it’s .net, php, gae or python. Actually, that’s about my reversed order of preference language-wise, python being preferred. I care a lot more if it’s easy to support, modify and migrate if needed (of host, platform, database, whatever). Also I do want a way to try it out hassle free. Open source is always better but not necessarily best.
TLDR: What’s the best shopping cart out there that can be used to sell services rather than products?
I just went through the process of installing and trying several carts for a project that I was working on. As Pierre says above, “There is no best shopping cart, however there is one best for your specific need” That is a very truthful statement.
My project was for an on line soap company that has 5 different categories with 5 or so variations each. Not a big store and not one that changes inventory often.
I tried the following carts: PrestaShop, Zen Cart, Magento, getshopped and phpurchase.
My findings were that for a small store, PrestaShop, Zen Cart and Magento are a bit overkill. For a small shop, getshopped and phpurchase are better fits.
Out of the 3 big shop solutions, I felt that Zen Cart is really hard to make look nice. It has a 90’s vibe about the template that it comes with and takes a lot of work to get around that. Magento and PrestaShop were really cool. PrestaShop seems very UK specific. It did not take Authorize.net and I think that there may be a plugin that you can get. Magento seems like a great solution for a larger store and I liked the backend admin interface.
I purchased getshopped plugin and integrated it into my WordPress site (I purchased the Authroize.net integration gold cart level) I had such trouble dealing with the multiple bugs that I found riddled through the code base. I looked at their forum and many people who had similar issues were not responded to. Alot of people were as frustrated as me. I tried customer support – no response. I asked for a refund, no response. Basically, Get Shopped was a complete waste of time and money.
I then found Phpurchase. The customer support person, Lee Blue was really nice – Lee answered my emails morning, noon and night. Lee is literally the nicest customer support person I’ve ever worked with! – so helpful. The code worked just as specced – no troubles and no complaints. I’m a very happy customer with phpurchase. If I need a small ecommerce site in the future, I will use that solution again, for sure.
Note, I’m not an affiliate of Phpurchase or have any type of financial gain by recommending them, I just had such a rough time with getShopped and such a wonderful experience with Phpurchase!