E-Shopping Carts ? Suggestions ?

[CharlieH]

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions / recommendations etc regarding the intallation and use of an e-cshopping cart on a website ?

Looking for something relatively easy, something that doesnt require a degree in computer science to install and set-up etc

Ideally hosted by someone else, a kind of fill in the blanks type set-up would be great.

Seems to be many out there of varying price, some monthly some annual and even some FREE,

Any info / recommendations etc appreciated.

[Crushdepth]

If its just a small number of products, forget setting up your own shopping cart. Most ecommerce services (PayPal, whatever) provide their own cart with links and buttons you can embed in a simple HTML webpage. You register your products there, they generate HTML snippets you automatically. User clicks on a button and is bounced to the cart or bounced back to your site. Very easy to set up (its just a link) and low maintenance.

If you have a large number of products then you may need to set up your own shopping cart - but there is a significant amount of labour and maintenance if you go that way.

Edited September 28, 2011 by Crushdepth

[CharlieH]

If its just a small number of products, forget setting up your own shopping cart. Most ecommerce services (PayPal, whatever) provide their own cart with links and buttons you can embed in a simple HTML webpage. You register your products there, they generate HTML snippets you automatically. User clicks on a button and is bounced to the cart or bounced back to your site. Very easy to set up (its just a link) and low maintenance.

If you have a large number of products then you may need to set up your own shopping cart - but there is a significant amount of labour and maintenance if you go that way.

Thanks for that but I am looking at something a little more elaborate than simple "buy now" buttons etc.

It will definitely need to be an e-commerce cart.

[SlideRiceFC]

It probably doesn't get much easier than using wordpress and one of the e-commerce plugins (both free). You could get away with a cheap shared hosting plan for something like that.

ZenCart is another good one. There's plenty of plugins and free to cheap themes and the cart itself is free and not overly complex.

OS Commerce is good but it can be a bit complex to set up although once you do it probably has the largest amount of plugins and whatnot.

CRELoaded is a paid cart that is basically a more optimized and secured version of OS Commerce. This makes setup more complicated and of course as stated above the cart it's based off of is already pretty complex.

So that being said if you want simple and you won't be selling a ton of items I'd go the wordpress route. If you want something more feature packed but still fairly easy to set up and use go with ZenCart. Most of these have demos so go play with them and see if they fit your needs. If you haven't found a host yet look at some of the recommended hosts from the cart makers. Many have one-click installation of popular cart packages right from the control panel for your hosting plan. You'll still have to configure the cart but the added headache of uploading and running an install script has been taken care of for you.

Another option would be a site like bigcartel, etsy, or Ebay which you can set up online stores and add products and they host your store. They are free to cheap to start out and get your feet wet but in the long run I can't see any real reason you'd want to use one of those services if you are serious about your online store.

Edited September 29, 2011 by SlideRiceFC

[Phil Conners]

The op asked for "something that doesnt require a degree in computer science to install and set-up". In my opinion that excludes both ZenCart and oscommerce.

As others mentioned, both Paypal and WordPress offer reasonable user-friendly carts.

In any case I'd recommend avoiding oscommerce. I manage a few installs and they are a nightmare to manage and have many vulnerabilities that allow hackers to inject php scripts onto the site easily.

[dave111223]

Seems like the OP is looking for something simple to setup/use for a person with no web design experience...I'd say you are probably looking for something like a Yahoo or Ebay hosted store:

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/ecommerce/

In the future you'll probably want to upgrade to hosting your own store (zencart, CRE Loaded, osCommerce, opencart etc... like others mentioned). But these options are definitely not just "filling in the blanks" that you requested.

[kamluan]

viritue mart (joomla component)is easy to use and free...(cms)works fine whit joomla...

Edited September 29, 2011 by kamluan

[Satcommlee]

Don't a lot of the large hosting/domain providers like GoDaddy etc. offer this as a service?

[link removed]

At least then you can get support from them.

Edited September 29, 2011 by Phil Conners
Link removed

[dave111223]

viritue mart (joomla component)is easy to use and free...(cms)works fine whit joomla...

Virtuemart doesn't work well with the new Joomla 1.7 and most virtuemart addon were for the old Joomla 1.5 version of Virtuemart....so virtuemart/Joomla are in a transitional phase at the moment so may not be the best option until the compatibility is sorted out.