As a freelance web developer I am often asked to develop online shops for businesses.  To build an e-commerce system from scratch would be an enormous task if it was to include the same features which many of the ready-made software packages include.  Up until now I have been using mostly software called JSHOP and occasionally Opencart.  Now it is time for me to look at what is out there and decide if I need to change the software and what I should change to.  In this post I am looking at the best php e-commerce shopping cart for my requirements.

Requirements

I want an e-commerce platform which is suitable for small to medium size shops, yet does not lack any of the main features and functionality that is expected in an e-commerce package.  I want something that is easily extensible, preferably with modules.  A good sized community is always helpful so this is desirable.  Last but not least, I want it to be low cost or open source, so $12,000 Magento is not going to be an option.

Hosted or licence based

E-commerce packages are available in three types of solution – hosted, paid self-hosted and open source.

Hosted – A monthly fee that covers the hosting, support, updates, and usually will give choices of themes for the design.  Examples of this include Shopify, BigCommerce and Volusion.

Paid self-hosted – Either pay a one off fee or a monthly fee, depending on the package, which gives a licence to use the software.  The software then has to be set up with hosting which gives the developers more control than the hosted choices.  Some paid examples are CSCart, JSHOP and the Enterprise version of Magento.

Open Source – These are free shopping cart packages that you host yourself.  Examples of free shopping carts are Opencart, OSCommerce, Prestashop and many others.

Open Source

Magento

Magento should need no introduction.  It is the largest, most used and most advanced e-commerce platform.  There are two versions of Magento, the free community version and the enterprise version currently priced at $14,420 per year.  I would only ever consider the free version as the others are out of budget.  The Enterprise version comes with extra extensions as well as a warrenty, a service level agreement and legal protection.

The main concerns of using Magento are that it is server intensive and running multiple Magento sites on a server could really affect server performance.

Magento is also over complicated for small/medium sized shops.  It is written in the Zend PHP Framework, which is popular for enterprise level PHP.  It is also one of the more difficult PHP frameworks which requires good Zend Framework experience to customise.

With a large enough project Magento would be a possible option, but I don’t plan on working on any projects of this size in the near future.  I am therefore ruling out Magento from being my chosen platform.

Drupal – Ubercart

Ubercart is a shopping cart integration for Drupal.   Like the Joomla shopping carts are suited for Joomla developers, this may be better suited for Drupal developers.  If I wanted to be able to use this and make fully customised shops, then I would need the same knowledge as a Drupal developer.

Joomla VirtueMart

An open source shopping cart extension for Joomla.  If you are familiar with Joomla you will know that it is often overly complicated for smaller sites and difficult to customise.  That being said, a Joomla developer will probably look no further than Joomla for an e-commerce solution.

My experience with Joomla has shown that if you find an out of the box solution then it will work great, but making a highly bespoke Joomla site can be difficult and a lot of work.

There are many other Joomla e-commerce extentions out there. This was included just because of its popularity.  If you know a better Joomla E-commerce extension please use the comments below.

Opencart

This is one I have used for quite a few shops, and it’s a real contender to become my main e-commerce platform.  Unlimited products, 20 payment types, 8 shipping methods, multiple currencies, great for SEO, looks good out of the box and plenty of available modules.

It is very nicely coded with a HMVC architecture, and everything being quite logically setup.  It is modular and is easily extensible which is why there are so many modules available and can be easily added to a shop.

It has a fairly large Good community, but not as big as Magento.  The community is a big plus for this e-commerce platform because of the selection of modules offered.

Prestashop

This is another free cart solution that I am seriously considering.  Prestashop has a community or nearly 350,000 contributors and 125,000 active stores.  It seems to have all the features that I’d expect from an e-commerce package, and an excellent selection of modules to extend.

Extensibility is one of the most important features for me as I often have to add new unique functionality which involves creating new modules.  Prestashop seems like it is one of the best shopping carts for extending, beaten only by Magento.

OS-Commerce

This has been around since 2000, being one of the earliest shopping carts to become available.  A few other carts have been developed from this including Zencart and Batavi.  This has been used by thousands of merchants over the years although, in my opinion, has seen better days.  It is a free solution but there are better shopping carts out there.

ZenCart

Zencart is also open source software, and one of the shopping carts to form as a result of osCommerce.   Some of the main improvements which have been made in ZenCart are that it is easier to install, easier to extend and better overall options by default.

Zencart may work for basic shops but will probably not be suitable for more complex sites.

Zeuscart

Zeuscart is an open source e-commerce package which has fairly readable and customisable code. The code seems like it would be easy  to edit but not without having to edit core code.  The main thing that puts me off Zeuscart is the lack of modular extensibility.

WordPress

Wordpress is worth a mention with over 16% of the Alexa top 1 million sites being  built with the software.  It was originally intended for a blog style website, although with the amount of plugins available it is not difficult to use WordPress as a CMS.  One step further is to use WordPress as a shop.  I’d consider WordPress for a very basic shop, possibly using Paypal and the Gravity forms plugin.  There are some other e-commerce plugins, but none are as substantial as the dedicated e-commerce options available.

Paid Solutions

CS-Cart

On first impressions this looks a very good e-commerce platform and for most clients it would be within budget.

Three packages are available with varying costs and features. Professional $345, Ultimate $650 and Multi-Vendor $985.

The default store front is impressive with lots of handy features like ajax filtering, lightboxes, product galleries.  The templates are built with the Smarty templating system which is used with the drag and drop grid system within the admin area.

My concerns with CS-Cart are that it is not as comprehensive as Magento, yet it does have an additional cost.  It may be better than some of the open source platforms although I’m just not sure whether the extra cost can be justified.

JSHOP

This is an e-commerce solution which seems to be rarely used, costing £195 for one licence or £795 for a developer licence which entitles you to unlimited shops.  I have had to use this for various shops, though not through my choice.  I have found the updates to be few and far between and no support unless you pay for the separate support package.

JSHOP comes with good features in terms of shipping, payment methods, products, gift certificates, discounts, special offers and templates.

The code is quite old fashioned with no MVC, and little change in the overall code since initial release in 1997.

JSHOP offers very few features for extensibility, although there are a few options.  Any major customisation will require the core code to be changed, which can get a bit messy.

After using JSHOP for no less than 10 shops I think I need to change to another platform which is part of the reason why I am writing this post.  JSHOP is just too much hassle for complex sites and not easy to reuse code.

X-Cart

Another PHP/ MySQL subscription based e-commerce platform which starts at $195 and goes right up to $12,950 depending on what is required.  The most expensive option includes hosting, which makes the most expensive self hosted package $1795.  X-Cart has a good selection of features including Facebook login integration, Mailchimp integration, product options and combinations, affiliates, multi vendor(on the expensive self hosted option) and many more.

Lemonstand

This is a feature rich e-commerce system which was launched in 2010.  This is an alternative to Magento for large e-commerce sites.   There is a one off license fee of $300 or is free to try with the developer license.  I would try this for a larger site although the majority of the sites I work with are not at enterprise level.  The features and API look excellent, but it would be overkill for a smaller e-commerce website.

Hosted Solutions

Shopify

This looks to be one of the most popular hosted e-commerce solutions available.  They have clients such as Gatorade, Foo Fighters and Pixar.  They charge a monthly fee which is quite reasonable for what you get.

I found this to be more limited when it came to creating a more customised shop.  The template files can be edited and new fields can be added for the plugins, but everything has to be done in the Shopify way which is limiting.

It’s good for a standard shop and doesn’t even take any programming expertise to setup.

I’d have to say that as a programmer this is not the right solution for me.  I can see why a non-programmer who could set this up themselves would choose this as it is much cheaper than hiring a developer.  This is more something that is just configured and not what I am looking for.

Bespoke

It is worth considering a bespoke option as there are benefits of building the e-commerce system myself.  It would make it easy to customise and I would have full control over which features I added.  I would also have full ownership of the code.

The downside to building a platform myself is the amount of time it would take.  As much as I would like to develop my own online shop, it would just not be worth the effort when there are excellent free options available already.

Hybrid with CMS

I did also consider developing a hybrid shop with an existing CMS as a starting point.  I looked at using the CMS Processwire and also considered the CMS PyroCMS.  Both already have fairly basic implementations of cart/e-commerce modules, but lacked a lot of the features which are found in some of the more comprehensive platforms.  I think this would still be a lot of work and not the right option for me at this time.

Conclusion

After a considerable amount of research I decided to choose Prestashop as the best PHP e-commerce shopping cart.  In the end it was between Opencart and Prestashop.  My past experiences with trying to extend Opencart was what convinced me to try Prestashop.  The extensibility is what set it apart from its competitors. I have also been impressed by the size of the community and the rate at which Prestashop looks to be growing.

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If you are writing your own content management systems or even extending a ready-made system, then here are a few DOs and DON’Ts for CMS’s.

Never overestimate the skill of your user.

Your CMS should be as easy as possible to use with appropriate labels positioned accordingly.  Having instructions for the user using throughout the CMS using tool tips is very useful for a novice user.

I have found one of the most common problems to be users pasting code from word processing software such as Microsoft Word.  Placing text into a WYSIWYG will not remove any formatting by default.  Which means word will try and add font tags and non HTML tags which will not work properly on a web browser.

Here is my solution to this problem for TinyMCE.

In the TinyMce initialisation code the “paste” plugin must be added to the list of plugins.  Various functions should also be added which will automatically strip out unwanted HTML tags.  This means users will be able to paste from Microsoft Word and the messy tags will be removed.

tinyMCE.init({
theme : "advanced",
mode : "textareas",
plugins : "paste",
theme_advanced_buttons3_add : "pastetext,pasteword,selectall",
paste_auto_cleanup_on_paste : true,
paste_preprocess : function(pl, o) {
// Content string containing the HTML from the clipboard
alert(o.content);
o.content = "-: CLEANED :-\n" + o.content;
},
paste_postprocess : function(pl, o) {
// Content DOM node containing the DOM structure of the clipboard
alert(o.node.innerHTML);
o.node.innerHTML = o.node.innerHTML + "\n-: CLEANED :-";
}
});

As seen on from http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Plugin:paste

Limit the user input – Validate

Include validation on all forms and only let the user input what they need to input.  This should help prevent the website from breaking or producing DB errors.

Image Uploads

Make sure images are automatically resized.  Non-technical users will often add images which are 2000px by 2000px and 10MB in size when all they need is a 10KB image.  By setting an automatic resizing with an image library you can control what the user saves to the server.
Limit permissions

Be careful when giving the users permissions as you don’t want the users to be able to either remove the admin or break the site.  You are usually better to limit certain users with various levels of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete).  Highest permission would be delete which would allow all other permissions, next would be update which would also allow create and read, then create which would allow read and the lowest permission level would be read only.

Reuse what you can

Sometimes tasks can be much simpler than what you first think.  For example if the user wants a lot of page types such as promotions and events and you notice they both require title, description, body fields.  You might then be quicker to reuse one of them and add a category field which will be either promotion or event (probably pointing to a category DB table though).

Keep it modular

Modules are the key the having a good content management system.

They allow for reusability which should save you time in the long run.

If you have a good modular starting point for a CMS and you have other developers using it then use the community to expand your CMS.  Allow developers to submit the modules they have built.  The more developers you have contributing to a CMS the better.

Author Scott Pringle

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