Well you will meet cs-cart fans on here.
I started looking at magento for a number of reasons but all I heard was.
Great but resource hungry need VPS or better server
Hard to use and work with
So free but up go the $$ and time so $$ costs.
(Main reason for looking were API’s to work with some other software but their guys are now saying they may be able to sort this with cs-cart anyways)
As always there are some that love one and some another. There is not a perfect cart it depends on what you are trying to do some have one killer feature.
When I first chose cs-cart I wanted to ensure things like going places - good forum - good support - fair prices but an income structure for the company that would mean they will still interested in taking it forwards. Plus it had to have some key features for my own usage - looked at this first before the others since otherwise it was pointless.
Since then cs-cart has improved on all but the forum - which has always been very active so it could not improve on this side really.
The new version is very very good and seems to have got rid of all the things on my shortish wish list.
Quick to work with and change things. Options here and options there - stock tracking with options etc etc.
It can take a while to understand how one bit changes to another but you can have something working very quickly and watch how changing settings changes the front display with just a few clicks.
[quote name=‘jain1980’]Can’t imagine what the developers think when they design upgrades. Or is it just that they are too stubborn to look into this issue.[/quote]
I think the problem would be, that the programers don’t have an experience with accounting, self employment and other things. They are just employees and programer.
Hi
I looked at magento multiple times over the past year or so, and every time, I see that magento is really lacking, first of all, their free versionis is terrible and in-complete, their paid version - is way to expensive. Plus what is the hype with magento anyway. Alot of Sales Talk - and nothing else. They lack big time.
Cs-Cart - is reasonably priced, plus they are constantly updating and improving the cart with the latest Java, and Dhtml scripts, You can’t beat this for the price.
Thanks
[quote name=‘huroncomputers’]First of all, excuse me if there are two similar posts - I thought I submitted one, but I don’t see it in the forum
I have a small computer shop - want to offer productas as well as Custom Built configurations. Cs-cart and Magento both seem to offer these capabilities - What features makes CS-Cart worth the extra dollar investment over Magento?[/QUOTE]
Hello,
We offer both Magento and Cscart Free installation on our UK web hosting.
Cs-cart is really cool and easy to install. Modification of themes is much easier.
Without even reading this bunch of characters, I smell the banned “S” looser! Why the hell you’re coming back? Buy yourself a rat and go for a walk you imbecile.
[QUOTE]Without even reading this bunch of characters, I smell the banned “S” looser! Why the hell you’re coming back? Buy yourself a rat and go for a walk you imbecile.[/QUOTE]
Speechless, but what if you are wrong? LOL
Actually, as I recall “Spiraling outta Control” didn’t have much good to say about Windows servers, so this may not be him, unless, it is some sort of reverse psychology being played!
Find me another person on this forum, who wrote so much about almost nothing. 5% of it makes some kind of sense, where the rest is just keypressology [eh, a new word?]
[quote name=‘Noman’]Find me another person on this forum, who wrote so much about almost nothing. 5% of it makes some kind of sense, where the rest is just keypressology [eh, a new word?][/QUOTE]
Rhymes with Loli Pop
To me it doesn’t sound like either person.
Spiral usually stuck to security related stuff and more than likely would have focused more on that. Plus, I agree that Spiral is more for Linux, etc.
Lee Li Pop isn’t banned and is still on the forum from time to time, or at least I see her name on the list of online users. So I don’t see her making this post as an unregistered user.
Brandon
[QUOTE]Its actually pretty rare to have a developer, vendor, marketing experience all in one package… me.[/QUOTE]
Undoubtedly, one in a million! 
We need someone with your talent to start creating & offering mods, especially shipping related improvements, and need it last month!
Hello Brandon,
[quote name=‘brandonvd’]
So I don’t see her making this post as an unregistered user.
Brandon[/QUOTE]
I use Fluxbox
Lee Li Pop
The votes are in, CS-Cart wins by a landslide!
Noman, did you end up shooting your cat?
[quote name=‘Struck’]The votes are in, CS-Cart wins by a landslide!
Noman, did you end up shooting your cat?[/QUOTE]
…in progress. The beast is faster than I am and can claim walls. Must have some glue on feet or something. I will get it soon, if my problem with thumbs in IE7 isn’t resolved. Someone must pay for my wasted time.
[quote name=‘Lee Li Pop’]This is called the “[COLOR=“Red”]Free[/COLOR] Open Source”.
Exactly, you have the Magento’s body for free…
Free for all, but with a “Magento legless cripple and armless and beheaded cart” edition.
If you want the Magento’s legs, arms and head, it’s $8,900 USD Annually!
Compare Editions here.
For example:
Logging of Administrator Actions
[COLOR=“Blue”]+[/COLOR] Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Customer Store Credits
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group (limited catalog access)
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Private (Club) Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]=[/COLOR]
Magento: $8,900 USD Annually
CS-Cart: $265 + (only if you want/need upgrade) $49.50 Annually.
Lee Li Pop
Be aware! $8,900 USD it’s STARTING prices!!!
Magento’s prices [COLOR=“Red”]starting[/COLOR] at $8,900 USD Annually :D[/QUOTE]
In $8900 you built better site than magento
[quote name=‘Unregistered’]I agree mostly. I am a software engineer. Magento is a far far stronger and capable eCommerce application. It takes a really good server (or host that doesnt overload) to handle a reasonable traffic load. Its capabilities and features are far more robust than CS-Cart.
CS-Cart is a decent small business cart solution. The problem with it is the developers apparently never decided whether to make it complex or easy. It sits inbetween.
Like Magento, they dont sell things online, instead, they sell a shopping cart application. When feature requests are requested they decide whats important or not and often miss the boat.
SunShop is another shopping cart for non-enterprise eCommerce. Its easy to use, easier to “template” and extreme attention was clearly paid to the ability to administrate it. Its “a class act” all be it again, not as robust as Magento or even OSCommerce.
Anyone who actually reads eCommerce reviews or varied industry related magazines/sites will realize there are scant few “PHP” based shopping carts in any “TOP 10 Shopping Carts” and there are reasons for that, including PHP itself.
Sunshop usually makes the lists, again, its a class act albeit not a real robust one.
The others are carts like Mercantec, Shopzone, Shopsite etc. make the lists and have for many years.
Why?
Because they listen to merchants needs and deliver.
CS-Cart could be a “great” cart as far as PHP carts go. BUT… there is a complete lacking in documentation for developers, a complete lacking of documentation even for template designers and lastly the developers want to tell merchants whats important and not. Most merchants will make more revenue than CS Cart does as “Sales go”. That is to say, the consumer electronics vendor makes more revenue than CS-Cart company does annually.
I’ve read things like “Video is not a priority”, really? Thats simply stoooooopid to even say. Video is THE delivery mechanism for top level sales, TV sells ya know? Video sells.
There is no ability to expand base data entry fields. How BASIC is that to do?
In other words, not options, not features… base fields. For example, say I want a “Tagline” field. I should be able to make one, describe the table addition to CS-Cart and viola… Tagline with associated “Smarty” {tagline}.
This is not advanced, PHP forms design applications only been doing it since PHP has existed, and… thats what the pages are… forms.
Instead one need kludge **** such as using the “Short description” field and coding ones own parser based on that field. I’ve had to do this. Site needed taglines and videos. So… short description field now has [tagline][/tagline][video][/video] and atop the smarty templating it parses $product.short_description extracting the information from them and assigning to smarty.
I can make CS-Cart do just about anything I want it to do… But in order to do so it often requires screwing with stuff that really should not have to be done if the application were properly designed.[/QUOTE]
I tend to agree with these comments, CS-Cart has alot of potential especially right out the box and can be altered to fit your needs without too much work. The reality of it is that no single commerce platform will meet the needs of everybody so the customization factor had better be well thought out and documented. When comparing CS-Cart to Magento and others what I notice is the support of 3rd party tools and themes lacking for CS-Cart to make it compete better. CS-Cart has a ton of tables and so far it’s a gamble to manipulate the db directly which I’d rather have an api to manipulate things like inventory or adding products. I have reservations about either the Code or Template hooks architecture, seems short-sighted in terms of handling customization fully. Again with enough customization you can make it work but CS-Cart definitely lacks a bit in the developer documentation so your forced to re-engineer which takes TIME.
I’ve got two projects with completely different needs so I’m testing CS-cart with and it has more pluses than minuses compared to say Magento. I’m no Magento expert but they have some features CS-Cart lacks such as api’s, established 3rd party integration, and documentation. Not a deal breaker for most but awareness is important should you need a feature. Cost is not a factor either, I’d pay $1000 for a “complete” ecom package. I would have gone with shopify if their price model didn’t factor in the number of catalog products. I really like what they have done from an architecture standpoint but I want to standardize on a single platform if possible.
In the meantime I’ll just code around CS-Cart’s deficiencies. I’ll give the cs-cart support staff some credit, when I submitted a problem there was a response a few hours later. Support is a big deal from cs-cart and this forum seems to be pretty active in helping people out.
I discovered CS-Cart in September, 2009 and have migrated one store to the newest version in January. Another client will be moving to CS-Cart this spring. Previously I was stuck using osCommerce. The difference is like night and day. I’m very impressed with CS-Cart and will continue to encourage my other clients to use this tool when the time comes and they require a shopping cart solution.
Unregistered,
You have a point that encouraging 3rd party developers is good for CS cart users.
However, it is not the only business model around.
I think that you are missing the boat in your cart comparisons.
As an example Sunshop did not seem especially easy to use when I looked at it although phone support is great!
As for CS cart if you read this forum carefully you will see that almost without exception the users want one thing - stability that’s it- for now - end of story.
We want a bug free life with easy upgrades we have most of the add ons that we need.
As for small business owners being able to afford many thousands of dollars - you are way off target.
If I had midsized business with a marketing budget of $10,000+ I would have to look very carefully at a custom designed shopping cart.
Unregistered,
I thought the thread was about cs-cart vs. magento, not the philosophical differences in ecommerce design/dev/support and open source projects. Make your point if your on-board with cs-cart because or not. It’s not clear if cs-cart, Sunshop, Joomla, or whatever else you like technically meets your requirements. Anybody can tear apart the “software engineering” aspect of development and while cs-cart has it’s issues IMO for the price it offers quite bit out of the box for both developers and non-developers. Your point about skills is valid, few people have all the skills to develop/market/operate a website but smart site owners tend to pay for those skill gaps.
Concerning your “next point” response, I think your issue comes down to what’s the cs-cart business model and strategy going forward. I’m not sure this is fully known but were not talking enterprise software either where it’s more applicable so is that a decision point if cs-cart is a good choice for the overall investment? In comparison to other open source and commercial vendors the idea of popularity can change overnight. It still doesn’t imply that a small software company is inferior to the popular products. Personally I haven’t found the “perfect” ecom package but cs-cart offers enough for the specific project at hand and I’m not going to waste months over-analyzing every technical feature.
Hello Unregistered,
[QUOTE]SunShop as I noted isnt as robust as CS-Cart but its extremely polished.[/QUOTE]
I closely looked over sunshop about a year ago while I was in the hunt for a replacement for our .asp stores.
Here is a typical product url of which is similar within every one of their listed “Feature Stores”
sunshopstore/index.php?l=product_detail&p=177 :rolleyes:
You gotta be kidding me, it is 2010 & they still seem to have url’s structured from the 90’s. Although they claim to offer search engine friendly urls, oddly enough, I sure couldn’t find where they were being used by any of their customers. So, I said bye bye to suncart & kept on looking.
[QUOTE] CS-Cart as excellent potential and we’d love develop for it. That is to say, develop addon’s.
Not quite sure why its said that “CS-Cart has nearly everything we need”. Its not really close. Take a gander at a decent banner/advertising app or plugin and tell me CS-Carts is useful? The bulk mailer is extremely basic, yet, both of these mechanisms are key to increasing commerce.
I dont “Knock it”, we’d like to help make it better but it seems as though users have interest in that but the developers dont respond. That should make any prospect user of the software concerned.[/QUOTE]
Although I don’t feel it is wise on their part, CS-Cart personnel do not often reply to forum posts. Perhaps it is simply growing pains & they don’t currently have the time to do so, not sure, however, you would be best of for the time being to contact them directly via email regarding your concerns.
And yes, we do need more active developers as CS-Cart indeed does have a very strong foundation to build upon, just needs a bit of final polishing!
Regards to confusing you with “someone else”, you should attempt to completely overlook all that as it is a very long story of which you truly don’t want to be bothered with! Consider it as a simple case of mistaken identity! 
It most likely would help reduce the confusion if you could eventually register!
Registering takes seconds and helps those of us who want to follow your excellent comments.
So go on do it for me.
You can always use a chuck away email address.