Online Shop - Recommendations

[Fantazia]

Hi all,

I'm looking to build an online shop on my website to sell Category 3 fireworks and was wondering if anyone has any recommendations regarding online shop software to use and merchant services etc.. My website is hosted on Linux if that matters.

Glen

[peterjhale]

you could try oscommerce - it's completely free open source s/ware

[Fantazia]

Thanks Peter, had a quick look at this and all I can say is that I'll not see the light of day for a while

[peterjhale]

that's a confusing reply

I believe it's dead easy to install

I have it on this site as a test - took about 10 minutes to set up

[TWD-Tony]

Zencart is also a good (and free) alternative, it is based on the same code base as OSC but there are differences between the software...
We use Zencart all the time for clients eCommerce site's - they are all very impressed with it and although these systems look complicated - once you have them setup all you need to do is keep ontop of your inventory...

[Fantazia]

Peter, I've put it on my site and am getting an error regarding register_globals being disabled in my php.ini etc.... looking this problem up has lead me to read that enabling this is a bad idea. Any comments, and exactly how do I enable it anyway, quickly reading the docs makes me think theres some command i need to put in my .htaccess file ?? Things are never easy are they

[Fantazia]

Got it sorted now Peter, it's pretty good I gotta say, still lots to do though and a few little probs to sort, but I'll get there.
Glen

[Anthony Ravenscroft]

I ended 2005 by doing death-tests on like eleven shopcart vendors. digiShop was quite good, http://digishop.sumeffect.com/, but I wasn't totally happy with the price-versus-power balance.

I finally settled on something less slick & far cheaper, X-Cart, http://www.x-cart.com/. My accountant is impressed by the tax-collecting complexity, which mostly makes my head hurt so I'll take her word for it, since she's the one I pay to fill out the forms. Though supposedly a "plug&play" package, you really do need to know something about HTML, & ought to get the hang of some PHP rudiments as well. After that, it's a snap.

[bizNorthEast.co.uk]

I used oscommerce here's my site:
http://www.henwed.com

you can buy hosting where it is already set up for you.

[Anthony Ravenscroft]

FWIW, I spent a month doing an extensive cost/benefit analysis & live comparisons, & finally settled on X-Cart as the best option. Reasonable price, surprisingly good tech support, a little quirky for initial installation, lots of power, & shockingly easy to customise -- I know close to nothing about either CSS or PHP, yet I'm making good graphical & functional choices thanks to the dynamic editing features. In addition, they have a very lively secure forum with hundreds of helpful fellow users who seem to compete for the best answer to obscure questions.