For a few years now I have been tinckering with online shops. When people asked me how to go about setting up an online shop, my automatic response was always – “use osCommerce“. Recently I had some time and browsed around looking for alternatives and I think that ZenCart might just be a better option for some people looking for a completly free shopping cart.
osCommerce is possibly the most established open source cart. It has been around for years and is now a very stable and proven ecommerce platform. There are thousands of freely available contributions to customise it. There is also a very active online community ready and willing to support newbies. The only problem with osCommerce is its outdated software architecture – display and logic are intermixed and very tghtly coupled. Modifying the look and feel of an osCommerce site can quickly become a major effort. Templates are essentially complete new installations of the cart, so if you have any contributions installed moving to a new template can be a real pain in the proverbial.
There is a completely new version of osCommerce in the pipeline which promises to be great, but it is currently still in alpha stages. I’ll keep an eye on it and when I have a bit of time I will experiment with it and maybe write up a bit more.
ZenCart traces its roots back to osCommerce, but is now a very different piece of software. Out the box it has very good support for templating which makes changing the look and feel of your store very easy. The downside of ZenCart is that there are far fewer addons available (all addons have to be pre-approved by moderators). For example – you may be limited in what payment methods you can support without having to do some PHP coding. There is a good online community where help can be found.
In summary:
I would go for osCommerce if you will design the look of your store upfront and are not likely to want to changed it drastically later. It is the more robust and time proven platform of the two.
I would go for ZenCart if the ability to tweak and update the design of your store is very important to you and you do not have the time/abilty to dive into PHP to do it.
Of course there are more choices for a free shopping cart, and there are a number of fairly low priced solutions too. But I think that for someone thinking of starting up an online shop on a shoe string budget osCommerce or ZenCart are possibly the best options right now.
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