Here I will try to outline the weaknesses that the CS-Cart has. I found these only after buying the cart, which might have been a tad rushed… I would have bought it anyway but I would have wanted to make an educated buy, aware of its shortcomings. Wouldn’t you?
I am not saying that CS-Cart has only negative sides. No, in fact, for its price it delivers a lot. So much that you might get lost in the features and to perceive that all of them work well.
My shortcomings list for version 2.0.14 when it was current (list is in no particular order):
Shipping price can only be received from shipping services (like UPS for example) only with the default box size for every item, only weight differs with each request. This makes a headache configuring shipping options for a range of products. Even a small cable is now calculated to be shipped with the bigger box than it will be packed in with. Same with much larger items… If you sell similarly sized items then you are in the clear, if not then setting up USPS, UPS, Fedex + all ground and air options is a complete headache. In the end there is no perfection, you just hope your settings will not generate shipping prices that will eat into your margin or scare the potential customers away.
While the cart allows great flexibility for price groups, the options for the items can only be set with ONE price. While the price of the product can vary, the option price will stay the same, no matter what the price group. Say, a shirt can be sold $10 retail and $8 wholesale but any modifiers will have to be the same price of all groups. So, to embroider a logo on a shirt as an option, it will have to cost the same price to retailers as well as wholesalers. If you are selling to different price groups this shortcoming can be totally unforeseen and become a real deal breaker.
Upgrades are hard to implement. With occasional modding the new update can mean a lot of work and hands on testing. You can be behind a few months easily. This really takes a considerable time out of your life, family, business. Look at it as a hidden expense, your time = money. The only smooth updates are with carts that are complied with proprietary code. Just want to mention that all carts with “open” source will have this problem. Nevertheless, there could been a better system updating modified code with CS-Cart. While there are some options available that minimize the direct code change, at times there is just no other way but to change algorithms inside of a PHP file (the core).
If you are not good with PHP and HTML/CSS/JS, you better hire someone. Unless you are a very easy going person and the defaults is more than enough, you will need skill and time to conquer the cart (make it turn tricks exactly how you want it). Perhaps a local developer will be cheaper and faster than the official help through cs-cart. It took me about 2 months with 5 days a week of constant CS-Cart to get familiar with its inner workings (and I am pretty good at web programming).
The cart as a software can be slow in performance. If you are using a lot of options and items, it will present itself in additional loading times. While it can be helped some, most tweaks only go that far… Before you commit, try out the full import of your items and options. It is possible that cs-cart can be slower than what you have used to with your previous cart by another brand. Only testing with your particular setup will show you true colors of cs-cart. Make sure to optimize your MySQL settings for proper sized cache to help speed up the DB access. You can apply some Apache, php.ini and .htaccess tweaks too.
Communication with the development team can be slow. While you are working, they are sleeping and vice versa. The team is in Russia. It takes roughly about 20 hours for a reply. If there is a misunderstanding or hard to explain idea, it might take days before you are in unison. Their written English skills are great, though. I found that this forum can present a much faster help, free too, from users like you. However, there can be emergencies when the original dev team is the only answer… Your emergency will have to wait.
Any new mods you might have paid for to CS-Cart team, it is likely they will be added as free into the next version for everybody. I have not experienced this myself, only read about. Just heads up about this possibly unique business model.
Product configurator is rather weak on features. The demo cs-cart site pretty much shows the ultimate example of what it can do. Test it to see if it fits your needs, it is nothing to write home about.
Checkout is something that no one can agree upon. While it has 2 modes (one page & 3 page), most owners who have CS-Cart storefronts do not like completely either method. Each checkout method has its own merits and rather substantial weaknesses. A new version should bring a complete overhaul of the checkout but it is still unknown if it will solve or add problems.
If your customer does not have Javascript enabled, it is very likely he will not be able to checkout and his/her experience browsing the store will be affected as well. No “JS” customers quite possible mean a lost sale.
Thumbnail sizes, what sizes? Just one size for all. While the next version is brave enough to gossip changes, for now it is just one thumbnail size for product pictures. The thumbnail options are very basic and there are even free carts with better thumbnail features and implementations. While CS-Cart does have implicit functionality to create different thumb sizes, for products you are still limited to one size. If you change that size, the thumbs cannot be re-generated.
Taxes + shipping + discounts might calculate incorrectly. While I have not come across this problem personally, I read on the forum that with the wide range of countries and oddities of calculating tax into discounts and shipping, the total might not be calculated correctly per rules of your region. Perhaps you might want to test it out too.
Editing templates can be a hard work even if you are an HTML/CSS wiz. The development team is very loose on the idea what should represent an “ID” or a “class.” To me it seems that if it would not be for Javascript, they would have only css classes… The logic behind of making it a class or an id is not evident and # of classes added only as a bare minimum to make that particular template work. While one should accomplish a lot by just editing a CSS stylesheet file, it is often impossible just to rely on pure CSS. Very often one should go to the template to add/edit classes to bring in new descriptors for CSS needs. I also have to add that CS-Cart is using Smarty to style and build templates. On a personal level I feel intense aversion to write Smarty code.
This might not be a big deal for some but if you on some level feel like selling your website-business-domain with the cart as a package deal in some near future… you can’t. The license that you buy cannot be transferred. Probably a potential customer can buy an additional stand-alone license of cs-cart but it is just complicates the issue of a sale and transfer.
Bugs, go the the bug area to see a “zoo” of cs-bugs. Spend some time reading the entries to get a feel and decide for yourself. The bugs at times are not fixed right away, it might take a few versions in-between. Also, with the development team, at times, you think it is a bug and they don’t. If they don’t feel like it is a bug, it does not get fixed. Note, I am not saying that CS-Cart has more or less bugs than any other shopping carts, I am simply saying that some bugs are present and it is up to you to judge if you are comfortable with the number of bugs and the frequency they are smashed and fixes are made available to users.
Other thoughts:
Newsletter feature is really entry level, it is very likely you will never use it. If you will, make sure to give it a proper test.
The promotions while flexible to set up, still, may not deliver all what you want. Test, test, and test.
Forms had a lot of bugs or unfinished code, seems like the next version will fix some of them.
Using saved credit cards now is very unfriendly to a user at the checkout.
Misconfiguration of the folders can expose your database backups without being evident so.
Shipments have a weird implementation that is not logical, check this feature out for yourself.
Note that CS-Cart is only a few years young, while it is growing, it did not build a cult following as yet.
[COLOR=“Red”]Feel free to add your own list.[/COLOR]
I have been having fun with hosting provider (siteground) and cs-cart support trying to find out what settings need to be done to make import products work in cs-cart. I have 17,000 products I need to import and only able to import 1,300 at a time by breaking up import file.
Have you or anyone found server settings to make the import function of cs-cart work for more than 1,300 products at a time.
I think it is coming from shared server and when I contact them they seem to think I need to spend $100-195 a month to upgrade hosting to dedicated so I can adjust server settings but no one can tell me what settings are causing the problems.
As a new possible customer of cs-cart, (still Demo) until it works.
They have to try their demo and then no one can tell you why import don’t work, it is not possible to run a web site with current inventory or pricing having to break up import’s to such a small size.
I have two other sites on under opencart which has the same problem with import and was hoping to change to cs-cart. The other is hosted by networksolutions and their e commerce package does work. My have to just stay with them. $100 a month 100,000 possible products, with import working.
Sorry, just frustrated web site owner trying to find a solution. How can they charge for ecommerce software that don’t work? They even say unlimited products and great support come with package. HUH!!!
Could be a lot of things, but I would check the max upload file size setting in php. That’s often 2mb on a shared server, which is quite small. There could also be an issue with file access settings or php extensions that are installed.
It isn’t OO (object oriented) PHP. So there are tons of files with huge blocks of "if ( $mode = ‘something’ ) {} ". Would be much easier to work on the code if it were OO. It would also allow for better modularity.
17)The templates don’t use a fall back system. It copies everything from the base template directory to the selected template directory. This makes for many duplicate files. It should look for the files in the template directory, and if not found, fall back and search in base. Would allow for much easier modifications.
18 ) They don’t keep their 3rd party libraries up to date.
[quote name=‘alleikis’]I have been having fun with hosting provider (siteground) and cs-cart support trying to find out what settings need to be done to make import products work in cs-cart. I have 17,000 products I need to import and only able to import 1,300 at a time by breaking up import file.
[/QUOTE]
I had similar problem with 1and1, import would only take so many products no good answers from anyone switched to martfox and imports 5000+ no problem.
I have tried Interspire and Magento a while… And that what the TexasGuy says in his reviw, applies to them as well… NO ONE cart is perfect, no one comes without bugs, no one will run fast with xxx products when you choose a wrong server package or host, etc. And I would say that CS-Cart is “perfect” because of the open code. Everybody can make modifications or customizations… By most paid carts you can’t. Unless you pay they development to do that… and how much would that costs??? $xxx…
I would just want CS-Cart to properly test for bugs.
The new Dibs module introduced with 2.0.13, and still exists with 2.0.15, has a bug that makes the module unusable, so I notified them on the helpdesk. I had to contact Dibs who told me the problem and CS-Cart fixed it. But as I reported the bug in the helpdesk, CS-Cart probably believe I should pay for it with my support days. (They did make the changes on a test installation of mine, but I’m still using 2.0.12 with the original Dibs module I paid them to do 18 months ago.)
I can’t say I’m very happy with this as they clearly didn’t test the module, and I had to pay them correcting the bug they did.
Mind that the number of websites using CS-Cart is relatively small, so the number of found bugs is much smaller than say for magento. If CS-Cart would be exposed to millions of users, a lot of bugs would likely to be reported that stay under the radar now. The number of bugs CS has should be seen in this perspective. So the comparison with magento isn’t as straightforward.
Another weakness I see is almost an absence of add-ons. I mean: where is the app store and the add-on developer program?
I’ve been using CS-Cart for some time and always thought it was great, but their hasn’t been a update for the system in a long time (nothing other than the odd bug fix) I remember about a year ago I asked CS-Cart if they would be adding support for UK Postal companies like ParcelForce integration, TNT etc and still after all this time nothing.
Some people might think this isn’t really a priority but too me and a lot of UK companies that use PF, TNT or royal mail, it really is.
I in the end decided to try out interspire’s cart and I must say that the interspire’s dev team have a very quick turn around for fixing bugs, they release updates a few times a month, usually with bug fixes and new features.
Another thing that made me try interspire out was the fact they keep their company blog active, The CS-Cart blog usually only gets a new post here and there, which could be a good sign showing that they are working hard on the next update…or it could be a bad thing, either way its nice to hear regular updates through the blog even if their isn’t much going on as to do with updates for the cart.
I also strongly agree with what someone else said further up with regards to Addons, I’ve said it before in the forums, I think cs-cart should have a addons page on their website similar to magento’s what would allow the public to post both free and commercial addons.
I really hope things improve with cs-cart soon as I really did like it a lot, but its going to have a lot too compete with as I don’t really feel it has more / better features than interspire’s anymore (specially some of the features they have planned for next release) and even opensource carts are already at the cs-cart level or further e.g. opencart, magento, prestashop etc.
Anyway, was looking at php.net site, they are assemling a collection of tests for their functions to test against for bugs in future versions. Not sure how CS-Cart tests their releases, do they write automatic tests or is it manual human testing?
Anyway, was looking at php.net site, they are assemling a collection of tests for their functions to test against for bugs in future versions. Not sure how CS-Cart tests their releases, do they write automatic tests or is it manual human testing?[/QUOTE]
Well I would hope they use phpUnit testing or something or use an IDE that allows debugging. I am sure they do.
I would say some of it is OO. They use static methods and the registry pattern.
[quote name=‘phazei’]16) It isn’t OO (object oriented) PHP. So there are tons of files with huge blocks of "if ( $mode = ‘something’ ) {} ". Would be much easier to work on the code if it were OO. It would also allow for better modularity.
17)The templates don’t use a fall back system. It copies everything from the base template directory to the selected template directory. This makes for many duplicate files. It should look for the files in the template directory, and if not found, fall back and search in base. Would allow for much easier modifications.
18 ) They don’t keep their 3rd party libraries up to date.[/QUOTE]
After spending months and months trying to get osCommerce and it’s clones working the way we wanted we discovered cs-cart. My first impression was “WOW. This is everything we are looking for!!”. Then, after purchase and installation, we started trying to figure out how this thing works. Our impression changed. One thing for sure, if it doesn’t do what you are looking for, you’re not going to change it like you can osCommerce. Forget about looking at the code to try to figure out why something works the way it does. It could take months and months to learn how the software is put together if you’re not an experienced PHP developer.
If we weren’t both experienced developers I’m not sure we could have gotten where we are with cs-cart. We research issues on the knowledge base just to discover that the proposed solutions don’t work. So I have to dig in and try to figure out why. Sometimes I do, sometimes I can’t get anywhere with it. They supposedly give you 30 days support. But it takes 30 days just to get to where you know enough to ask questions. Forget about getting real answers on the forum. It appears the cs-cart guys don’t answer much and everyone else is too busy trying to get their own business going.
I can’t help but feel that the application was purposfully left lacking in many areas. That way once you get committed you then have to go back to the development team and contract them to “fix” it to your needs. And from what I have read it is not cheap. You also have some consultants trolling around ready to help you out. But I just can’t convince myself that that is a safe and reliable option.
CS-Cart could be a top of the line solution for eCommerce. But there are just too many critical items left out or mis-implemented. The documentation is woefully incomplete or inaccurate. There is no real warranty on the code you pay for.
We will continue to use CS-Cart because it generally does things for our customers that we like. It is a struggle to make certain things work properly. But at this point we don’t have much of a choice.
If you decided to buy a “bugged” brain damage for $285, be aware of Technical Support as well. Technical support is a bunch of “good guys” who are polite, however, most of the time (in my case all the time), they have no clue what are you asking them about. God forbid you bought Tech support, you paid for Knowledge Base referrer then. Time you spent figuring all bugs and glitches may not be worth an effort, especially if you have no tech support.
[QUOTE]3) Upgrades are hard to implement. With occasional modding the new update can mean a lot of work and hands on testing. [/QUOTE]
This is a crucial point… I’m curious to know how you guys handle this. Do you keep detailed notes of what you modified? Do you comment your code modifications every time? Or do you start from scratch every time you want to upgrade to the newest release?
