Interspire or CS Cart

Hi, did anyone compare these in detail? I would be interested in your views.

At a glance Interspire and CS Cart are sharing many features. Especially Interspire and the new CS 2 Beta. Has anyone looked properly under the bonnet?:smiley:

[quote name=‘Ola’]Hi, did anyone compare these in detail? I would be interested in your views.

At a glance Interspire and CS Cart are sharing many features. Especially Interspire and the new CS 2 Beta. Has anyone looked properly under the bonnet?:D[/QUOTE]

Have you checked the price for that special edition (“Mall?”) of Interspire “cart”?

this cart is one of the biggest ripoffs in e-commerce history, not only did they knonck off all the features from CS2 (good job for making a public beta CS, you asked to be ripped off) they ripped off the addon club, made a cheap pathetic wanna be product tabs mod, their KB is $495…LOL, after the ridiculous price check out the ridiculous upgrade policy:



How Much Will the Upgrade Cost?



As per our upgrade policy, upgrading to Interspire Shopping Cart 5.0 is free for existing customers if you’ve purchased within the last 60 days. If not, you will be able to upgrade for 50% of the retail price for the edition you’ve purchased.



We will of course notify all existing customers when 5.0 is officially released.



That’s a $150 upgrade…LOL…and if you have the KB add another $250…LOL, no thanks, you can buy 3+ CS2 license’s for that price folks, and if you’ve made a donation to club addon for the club’s KB you can install that on unlimited domains FREE, sounds like CS is the way to go…

Not only to mention what joe says as far as a price comparison…as I believe Interspire is way too high priced in comparison to CS-CART (or maybe we’re just spoiled because CS-CART is so reasonably priced) :wink:



Here’s my take…it’s a bit “long-winded” but I think it makes a valid point.



[URL=“http://forum.cs-cart.com/showpost.php?p=46576&postcount=17”]http://forum.cs-cart.com/showpost.php?p=46576&postcount=17[/URL]

[quote name=‘snorocket’]this cart is one of the biggest ripoffs in e-commerce history, not only did they knonck off all the features from CS2 (good job for making a public beta CS, you asked to be ripped off) they ripped off the addon club…[/quote]



Sno, your idea is also ripped off by them? Oh my god… Cs-cart should take actions to prevent others from stealing features from their source code. However, it is impossible to do that because cs-cart opens all the sources to their customers. We should value that and support Cs-cart all the way!

there’s nothing anyone will ever be able to do to prevent competitors from copying features, ideas except to make our cart better, which it already is. It’s sad to see companies charging so much for so little, the whole point of why the community came together and formed the addon club was so we could get professionally coded addons at a fraction of the price, and to get them coded the way we, the community, wants them coded…

If you can get over the ugly looking backend and ****py templates, go with cs-cart. Get a real design done and have the cs-cart team integrate it for you. Interspire is a lot of fluff and hype for not much. Stick with cs-cart, — Many more features that you wont have to pay for in the future when youll actually need them.



There are better carts out there… but not for the money :slight_smile: And interspire is not worth what they are asking…

Thanks everyone for sharing your views…

I am a new user/purchaser of CS-Cart and am totally convinced that CS-Cart is the overall best value (Features vs Quality vs Price) of any cart system currently available! I am in the process of moving our two .asp based ecomm sites over to CS-Cart after narrowing my choices down to Magento, Cre Loaded, & CS-Cart.



After getting caught up on the “Magento marketing train” (and actually having one of our sites 2/3 of the way completed), I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could feel comfortable about running our established business on the Magento platform, every other day & every other upgrade I experienced some sort of “odd behavior” with our test site. I had been down that road before with “newer technology” as in running an .aspx cart system a few years ago and no longer have the time or inclination to waste in solving shopping cart problems, I need to spend my time on activiites that directly generate profit & income! Anyways…after 2-1/2 weeks we are close to being ready to go live with CS-Cart and it is looking sweet! Soon I will be purchasing our 2nd store license along with the Quickbooks interface from Wegibility which so far seems impressive. :cool:

[quote name=‘Stuck’]I am a new user/purchaser of CS-Cart and am totally convinced that CS-Cart is the overall best value (Features vs Quality vs Price) of any cart system currently available! I am in the process of moving our two .asp based ecomm sites over to CS-Cart after narrowing my choices down to Magento, Cre Loaded, & CS-Cart.



After getting caught up on the “Magento marketing train” (and actually having one of our sites 2/3 of the way completed), I came to the conclusion that there was no way I could feel comfortable about running our established business on the Magento platform, every other day & every other upgrade I experienced some sort of “odd behavior” with our test site. I had been down that road before with “newer technology” as in running an .aspx cart system a few years ago and no longer have the time or inclination to waste in solving shopping cart problems, I need to spend my time on activiites that directly generate profit & income! Anyways…after 2-1/2 weeks we are close to being ready to go live with CS-Cart and it is looking sweet! Soon I will be purchasing our 2nd store license along with the Quickbooks interface from Wegibility which so far seems impressive. :cool:[/QUOTE]

Congratulations!

Thank you Joe :wink:

I don’t know how I found CS-Cart but all I can say is I tried just about every free cart and so-called ‘professional’ cart (horrible beyond belief) out there and stumbled upon CS-Cart and never looked back…so worth the money!

[quote name=‘machine11’]If you can get over the ugly looking backend and ****py templates …[/QUOTE]

I’ve got to agree with this … CS-Cart needs to pay more attention to the organization and presentation of their software. I agree it’s the place to be, would not spend the money on interspire, am glad I bailed on X before getting too deep, and was already commited to CS before Magento appeared on the scene … but CS “looks” amateurish in comparison to many, and the organization, especially the back end is lacking in my opinion. It really has to hurt the marketability of CS … interspire is honestly just about the cleanest back-end I’ve seen … CS could actually learn from that.



I’m not going to jump on the self-congratulatory bandwagon … CS is great, I think I made a wise choice, but it still has lots of room for improvement. I like the moves being made in 2.0, especially the separation of presentation & content, and the upgradability, but ‘usability’ is still lacking imho.

[QUOTE]If you can get over the ugly looking backend and ****py templates[/QUOTE]



Actually, I think those comments are overly critical & quite harsh!



If you are serious about running a successful/profitable business, you shouldn’t be using any carts free out of the box templates anyway, you should be using your own custom unique design. The free templates CS-Cart provides are just an added bonus and several look quite professional in my opinion.



As far as the backend admin area, yeah, it could stand some more improvements, however, there are far worse backends out there & version 2.0 has improved, so CS-Cart is moving in the right direction.



Speaking of “usability” install Magento, place a few test orders & simulate your daily business order processing routines, try to modify a few order details, shipping changes, payment changes, etc. You will then realize that Magento’s backend may be prettier, but that will quickly be offset by all of the frustrations you will incur managing your business on a daily basis.



If someone knows of the “perfect shopping cart system”, please let me know of it. You know, one that has a beautiful admin area, allows you to build a beautiful front end, and actually has all of the features needed to run a complex online business already built in out of the box. :wink:

[quote name=‘Stuck’]Actually, I think those comments are overly critical & quite harsh!



If you are serious about running a successful/profitable business, you shouldn’t be using any carts free out of the box templates anyway, you should be using your own custom unique design. The free templates CS-Cart provides are just an added bonus and several look quite professional in my opinion.



As far as the backend admin area, yeah, it could stand some more improvements, however, there are far worse backends out there & version 2.0 has improved, so CS-Cart is moving in the right direction.



Speaking of “usability” install Magento, place a few test orders & simulate your daily business order processing routines, try to modify a few order details, shipping changes, payment changes, etc. You will then realize that Magento’s backend may be prettier, but that will quickly be offset by all of the frustrations you will incur managing your business on a daily basis.



If someone knows of the “perfect shopping cart system”, please let me know of it. You know, one that has a beautiful admin area, allows you to build a beautiful front end, and actually has all of the features needed to run a complex online business already built in out of the box. ;)[/QUOTE]



The comments arent overly critical, they are straight to the point and honest and if you actually read my post, you’ll notice I clearly state to get a custom design done and integrated.

Cs-cart already knows what it needs to do in order to make their cart more competitive. It’s fairly simple in terms of direction but I’m sure very expensive to accomplish. Give the most bang for the buck(which they already provide with a ton of features for an extremely low price), make a clean and easy to use backend(in progress), make some extremely pretty templates like interspire(for the computer illiterate) and hire a much bigger team to provide better support and project development.



Personally i dont care about the templates but it’s a big selling point for the mass public.



Once they have all this figured out, they will have the perfect cart :wink:

Ok, fair enough. I am also a stickler for details such as you mentioned.



Alot of shopping cart software companies have become pretty stagnant in new development/releases and painfully moving along at a snails pace (or appear to not be moving ahead at all).



I just think everyone needs to realize the fact that CS-Cart is only officially at version 1.3.5 (Soon to be 2.0.?), and look at how far they have come in their short lifespan! :wink:

If i say personally about CS-CART, this is best shopping cart but the problem is there there is no such payment modules for International client which we are interested. However if you can see Zencart they giving lots of free payment mod like Moneybookers, Alertpay, CCnow etc etc. The only disadvantage with csc is that.

Interspire says they are all about customer and customer satisfaction (and they used to be). Many times when I post a question (that should be easily answered in their own knowledgebase, and isn’t) it can take 2-3 days sometimes a week to get a response. Most responses come from 2 or 3 community members trying out stuff and reporting back to each other on the forums. My feeling is they got a bit too big, too fast and got into a nightmare app that they can’t support at all. The ISC. They made most of their money off of KB and SS and those should have gone down in price over the years, but it’s so far up now it’s crazy. If you are a long time user, it’s actually pretty cheap, but if you are just getting into it the price is ridiculous. It’s like buying a full version of Adobe CS4…



Now you can all laugh at me if you want (for buying VM), but back when Interspire was smaller and their software was cheaper all of the products were pretty good, easy to learn (even for some of the not so brightest bulbs in my company) SendStudio, ActiveKB, Article Live all worked well together. So when my company wanted to do the wholesale website Interspire had no cart and we went with volusion (which sucks and is ugly and clunky).



I’ve looked at tons of ecommerce software, carts and packages, $100K packages, down to free or open source like Magento. Including: Volusion, Zen, MarketLive, Scene7 (as a base), ATG, Netro, BlinkCart, Cartfly, Shopify, ASP, wordpress carts and a bunch of others. So we’ve been using Volusion for a few years and it just so gangly and really wasn’t what we were looking for. So then interspire comes out with ISC and I’m like cool. I love their stuff. But… I needed more, something like Magento, then they released the VM (Virtual Mall).



Now… I was promised that I could use the VM to open multiple stores (per brand) on subdomains, each with their own identity, without having to buy multiple cart licenses. I was promised that this was that solution. I was promised a Wholesale/Retail solution from the same DB, being able to manage 12-20 separate stores from a single interface/login. That was my reason for purchasing VM. Now let’s just say, when I bring up these points with my Sales Rep, he kindly disregards them by telling me to talk with the techs. When I pose the questions to the techs, they move the discussion to the “request new feature” board…



So any how, I paid way too much for ISCVM, it doesn’t do as promised, they released version 5 and all went on vacation, everyone, Interspire was shut down for 3-5 days after their newest release (seriously I posted for a week and got no response from the help boards).



The main flaw with interspire is their variables and shipping, but for me mostly the variables. They are bass-ackwards. There is no ability to shop multi item in a single click as any good wholesale cart needs. We are a T-Shirt Company, a wholesale customer needs to be able to buy: shirt, sku 4534, 5 S, 5 L, 5XL and 5 XXL in a single click. If that ability isn’t there, then you can’t call yourself a wholesale cart. It’s that simple.



So I have my entire shop online, 10 brands, tons of pages, KB, Locator, EM etc all integrated ready to launch and then I get to the variables and they can’t be modified in this way. Wicked!!! 3 Months work down the drain.



So today I go on the hunt again, I DL Magento again, thinking ‘it’s got to work’ why didn’t I go with it before? Oh yeah after installing and setting up, can’t import a DB. Fantastic, oh yeah, that’s why Magento sucks. Buh-leted. So then I’m looking around the Magento boards and I find a link to a different asp software I hadn’t seen before (really didn’t want to go that route) and then on their boards was a link here.



So I check of the front end demo, ok, nice clean simple, a bit messy looking, but I can make that pretty. Then I look at the back end… The CS-Cart back end is spectacular. Simple, straight to the point, everything in your face, possibly, the best backend I’ve ever seen :wink: …



So now I’m going to test out CScart. The customer sites look fantastic and we just completely remade our front end in css so it’s perfect timing. I’ll let you know. I’d much rather grow with a company that’s committed to it’s clients and making amazing software, than settling for some half working piece of drivel that is tons of promises with no delivery.



If csCart works for us, I’ll make you guys awesome CScart t-shirts, Maybe if it doesn’t work, we can do a trade :wink:



I DL’d 2.0 should I start there or go retro?



Best Regards-



Michael

Hello Themountain,



One month later…



What are the news?



Which one do you use now?



Interspire, Magento, Zen, MarketLive, Scene7 ATG, Netro, BlinkCart, Cartfly, Shopify, ASP, wordpress carts…



Or CS-Cart?





Lee Li Pop

when can I get my t-shirt?..lol, I tried ISC too and got a refund before my 60 days expired, sorry to hear you lost the cash to ISC, too much money for too little, CS is where it’s at, CS2 rocks the e-commerce world, code is easy to modify, addons are easy to code compared to other carts, it ain’t over yet folks, lots more coming from CS :slight_smile: