I love CS-Cart, I changed to Magento for a while but have recently decided to move back to CS after much reviewing of other systems.
Interspire SC was my second choice, and there are still a couple of features that I would love to see in CS Cart.
(and I know this is a big mod) proper order management and partial shipping of orders/individual item shipping. This would then allow for proper back orders, part payment of orders, etc etc.
The order process in the admin is excellent. Select customer or new customer or anon customer first, then on same page add products using ajax seach on SKU or description. Very clean process, very fast (important when you have a customer on the phone).
Tracking numbers for all orders (haven’t found this yet in CS).
Allow customer to buy product? Checkbox. When unticked, an option becomes available to display price or message to customer (useful as sometimes there are products available offline only but still want them in the store).
[quote name=‘purplemine’]I love CS-Cart, I changed to Magento for a while but have recently decided to move back to CS after much reviewing of other systems.
Interspire SC was my second choice, and there are still a couple of features that I would love to see in CS Cart.
(and I know this is a big mod) proper order management and partial shipping of orders/individual item shipping. This would then allow for proper back orders, part payment of orders, etc etc.
The order process in the admin is excellent. Select customer or new customer or anon customer first, then on same page add products using ajax seach on SKU or description. Very clean process, very fast (important when you have a customer on the phone).
Tracking numbers for all orders (haven’t found this yet in CS).
Allow customer to buy product? Checkbox. When unticked, an option becomes available to display price or message to customer (useful as sometimes there are products available offline only but still want them in the store).
Any comments would be great?
JHubb[/QUOTE]
We tried ISC for 2 months, it was a complete disaster, trying to do something as simple as a 2 column layout was an absolute freaking nightmare, mess up 1 piece of css and the entire layout goes wacko to the max, wacko is also their prices and upgrade policies, the cart lacks alot of features, their are positives but not enough to switch, their is a massive lack of 3rd party mods that are useful, we pretty much coded the knowledge base addon as a result of our horribly bad experiences at ISC and I’m quite happy we pulled it off so we could stuff it in their face…
ISC is a reasonable cart however they do themselves an injustice with their pricing. I have an ISC store currently that I’ll be moving to CS-Cart 2.0 in about 6 months. It’s way too expensive to maintain.
Their template system is ok once you get used to it. ‘It’s the getting used to it’ that’s the PITA if you have better things to do
Sno is right regarding the 3rd party addons. CS-Cart has bundles. ISC has…well…less.
Their KB is a horrible ripoff too. It’s just a big, expensive hook that they use to keep you in their clutches.
However, the SPEED of Interspire is much faster than cs-cart 2.0. I guess this also reflects Interspire is just a easy simple shopping cart which only worth 20 USD the most.
Even they give me some money, I will take the money and refuse to use them…
Thanks for the feedback, it’s kinda confirmed what I already thought. I am 90% sure that I am going to continue with CS Cart, it’s just a shame that there is no partial shipping and a better order input process.
At the moment I’m using Magento for two stores which I’ve actually got running quite fast and without any issues. I’m just testing the Protx Direct payments for CS Cart and then I’ll be back on board I think.
Not that version numbers are a litmus test for anything, but with ISC at v5 and just barely edging out CS-Cart at v2 on only a few features, there is no way I would spend four times more for ISC. My big push for CS-Cart v2 was the whole Block thing which I aint kidding makes my toes curl - outside of some minor bugs the feature just works! And as Sno mentioned, the ISC KB cost more than CS-Cart with a much better integrated KB.
Remember CS-Cart is still young so some of those obscure features may yet be implemented.
My opinion is based on testing the ISC v4 demos, not a live store - better safe than poor!
[quote name=‘Dave the Slave’]Not that version numbers are a litmus test for anything, but with ISC at v5 and just barely edging out CS-Cart at v2 on only a few features, there is no way I would spend four times more for ISC. My big push for CS-Cart v2 was the whole Block thing which I aint kidding makes my toes curl - outside of some minor bugs the feature just works! And as Sno mentioned, the ISC KB cost more than CS-Cart with a much better integrated KB.
Remember CS-Cart is still young so some of those obscure features may yet be implemented.
My opinion is based on testing the ISC v4 demos, not a live store - better safe than poor![/QUOTE]
I agree completely, I’m sold on CS-Cart, I love how easy it is going to be to modify, Magento was a nightmare, although I still had some great features.
ISC as you say is way too expensive, but as mentioned originally I do love their implementation of ‘call for price’ and admin ordering process, but those are things I can easily add or get built so CS is looking more and more attractive by the day. I have just persuaded one client to move over to CS, and (which I’m sure you’ll appreciate) once they saw the ease which blocks are created and moved around the site they were sold. It would be handy to be able to specify block layouts for specific pages and landing pages for categories, this would really give it the ‘edge’, but that is for another thread.
I’m currently on ISC and I’m trying to move two sites off of them and onto CS-Cart. I purchased my license during their beta phase and it was my understanding that I could pay a yearly maint fee and keep updating. Well, I was wrong. I only paid $200 during the beta phase for my licenses but when it came out the license cost $1,000. I didn’t have to pay that but still, it blew me away.
Also, they went from no product to version 5.0 in a little over a year. Every little feature they added justified a new version for them. When 5.0 came out they decided to change the upgrade costs and it was now going to cost me $600+ for each of my licenses to upgrade. I checked out the demo and almost nothing had changed between version 3 and version 5.
ISC is a very nice product to use from the backend but hasn’t SEO’d very well for me and I’ve done some searching and almost none of the sites I find that run ISC seem to do very well traffic wise. Maybe I just haven’t found them, I’m not sure. But a friend looked at my site and said there were a lot of SEO errors from the software.
[quote name=‘Haywire’]I’m currently on ISC and I’m trying to move two sites off of them and onto CS-Cart. I purchased my license during their beta phase and it was my understanding that I could pay a yearly maint fee and keep updating. Well, I was wrong. I only paid $200 during the beta phase for my licenses but when it came out the license cost $1,000. I didn’t have to pay that but still, it blew me away.
Also, they went from no product to version 5.0 in a little over a year. Every little feature they added justified a new version for them. When 5.0 came out they decided to change the upgrade costs and it was now going to cost me $600+ for each of my licenses to upgrade. I checked out the demo and almost nothing had changed between version 3 and version 5.
ISC is a very nice product to use from the backend but hasn’t SEO’d very well for me and I’ve done some searching and almost none of the sites I find that run ISC seem to do very well traffic wise. Maybe I just haven’t found them, I’m not sure. But a friend looked at my site and said there were a lot of SEO errors from the software.
Ditto! Hello my CS-Cart Compadres from the newest CS-Cart newbie!
I just purchased CSC license after months of testing.
Shopping cart software has become so complicated and extensive that it’s impossible to evaluate without spending tons of time getting deep into features and everyday functionality.
I narrowed down to Interspire/BigCommerce, CoreCommerce and CS-Cart and still couldn’t decide so proceeded with parallel development of same store in all three. The further I got the more I liked CS-Cart.
Regarding Interspire’s new hosted version called BigCommerce - it looks wonderful and IS a very nice product BUT - because it’s hosted, the code is shared with all other subscribers so forget about making even the smallest tweeks. This and a couple missing key features was a deal killer for me - oh well. One missing feature - you can’t do a back end CC charge!?!?!? The video shows the guy doing it during a phone order BUT if you investigate further you discover that it’s not a live transaction, it’s a manual window where you enter the CC data but then the program does nothing with it - basically a fancy notepad. You have to later manually charge the card outside the software on a CC terminal - Wow!!
CS-Cart has been a pleasant surprise. The support is excellent and the more time I spend with it the more nice features I find hidden away. These guys are smart. I think their main problem is communicating all the good stuff they have to offer - but I can live with that…
Welcome to CS-Cart, we’re glad your here, as I mentioned above, we also tried ISC, I haven’t looked at their software for a few months, it now looks like their trying to rip people off with the same re-labeled product. The hosted version looks like a joke and another attempt a pulling in more victims with their over-priced and self-rated software, I mean seriously folks: BigCommerce: rated #1…LOL who rated it #1? interspire…LOL, in edition to ISC’s over-priced and under featured products, check out this comparison.
Our Knowledge Base (KB) addon compared to ISC’s Knowledge Manager (KM), we only ask for an $80 donation with no license fee per store, KM is $495/per license…LOL, if you have 4 stores that’s $2000 !!! donate $80 for our KB and have 5+ stores…NO PROBLEM, still $80…LOL, sounds like CS is the way to go…Welcome aboard !!!
