Hi from new zealand!
Just wanna share my thoughts so far
New to the forums, though not new to cs-cart, tried it out around 4 years ago
& semi-liked it at the time, think I thought it too complex, went for Cubecart instead
“Back” now, ironic I suppose :rolleyes:
Been looking for carts for a new project I’m starting
Looked at Magento, Prestashop, Open-Cart, Cubecart & CS-Cart
And of course carts I avoided/didn’t look at ~ Zen Cart, Oscommerce
Cubecart didn’t have enough functionality / decent code
Prestshop yeah duno watever
Opencart yeahhh nah
Magento. never liked it, too slow & feels like the new oscommerce
(lots of users, though not necessarily a “great” cart)
totally not buying into people saying it’s the e-commerce platform of the future,
but whatever each to his own
Anywho based on a number of factors, CS-Cart is the winner this time round.
I like the design on the frontend, but more so the functionality and the number of really good functionality/addons readily available like RMA’s, repeat ordering, product importing & many things that would be paid-addons in Cubecart for example.
Built in Danish language was a bonus actually, yeah now that I recall, Built-in Danish language was one of the criteria. I think Opencart or Prestashop didn’t have it so yeah they were out.
Anywho overall I think the software thus far from testing seems fantastic & I haven’t really explored it much but its definately feature packed making it hard to find out how to do some things. I also like the onepage checkout, that was good. real good.
For example it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to view current Polls so I could edit the auto-created one that came with the Test data in my shop. So yeah I’d probably suggest the admin section be perhaps improved in terms of clarity & ease of finding things.
I think I’d possibly agree with the guy in another forum thread who said you need a 4year university degree in CS-Cart to use CS-Cart… LOL which feels true sort of, but I guess thats just how it is when you have a software with lots of functionality, though I will repeat what I said above and say i think the administration section ease of use can be improved
Another thing I wanted to say was, which isn’t really to do with the developers, but while I’ve been setting up my cart / exploring, I’ve had a few questions, and I tend to search the forums, and Im not joking when i say, that almost every question i searched for, I’d find a thread similar / the exact issue, being experienced by someone else, and either.
a. no-one replied
b. people replied, but gave a response that was either unhelpful/unrelated
To me this is quite annoying, because as a developer you sort of hope that whatever product you’re using / developing with, that there’s a decent community backing it.
Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong
I should add though, the support service of cs-cart itself was excellent, I sent 2 questions and got very fast responses that were helpful from Alexander Shabaev the support guy
So great stuff, suppose i could always purchase a few support credits later on if needbe!
One thing i just rememberd that sorta caught me off guard was that there doesnt seem to really be any “addons” or extra modules available for sale by 3rd parties.
Coming from cubecart that seems to be a big thing over there and is almost moulded into the Cubecart ecosystem
I would actually be interested in developing some addons myself for cs-cart though I haven’t actually found any Guide or Manual on how to do that in the Knowledgebase or forums yet, perhaps someone could point me in the right direction!
ps: just remembered, one issue I had for example was that I couldnt enable the SEO addon, i would press it, and it would say “seo cant be enabled right now” and I searched the forums, and people were talking about it in a thread, but no-one gave a proper answer, luckily I was able to figure out that the .htacess file that comes with it, needs to be altered so that the base url is changed from / to whatever folder location the store is located, then SEO worked. But yeah again the forums were sorta useless for find it, though I see the answers are located here: [url]CS-Cart Documentation — CS-Cart 4.16.x documentation
Think this post is a bit long now so I’ll stop
Overall good product, lots of functionality built in which is cool, I like it
End of the day, even though there are rooms for improvement, the way I see it you gotta look at your options, and far as I can tell, based on the carts I mentioned I evaluated above, CS-Cart is the one I’m going with for now!
cheers
I do remember you from the Cube Cart forums where I moderated back in the days of version 2.0.5 through the version 3’s when life seemed so much simpler. Welcome to CS-Cart. You’ve made a good choice.
When I came here I had a Cube Cart to CS-Cart mod done to import everything from Cube Cart. It worked well and a few users came over and haven’t looked back since. Long gone are the days when mods were freely distributed until people figured out that they could make $$$. Sort of ruined it for me. There are a few people here who still believe in that way of doing things and every once in a while someone will throw a thread with coding.
“…moulded into the Cubecart ecosystem”. Excuse me if I choke on that one. You have no idea how much blood was spilled working out the mod forum where third party developers could actually advertise their services. The thing that saved it was Al Brookbanks being so bloody forgiving. It was carnage and chaos there for awhile.