Shopping Cart

[jbrunker]

Does anybody have any feedback on OSCommerce vs. Agora? Also on merchant accounts. I've never used a merchant account before. Does it just plug-in somewhere in the shopping cart set-up? What does a merchant account cost? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

jb

[prince]

About a year ago I played around with Agora and was impressed – until about 6 months ago I played around with OSCommerce and was even more impressed.

The only problem I had with either was that I did not need all that power; therefore, I opened an account with third party credit card processor. (2checkout instead of Agora and then a merchant account at Paypal – then I made 'order' pages and check out pages with links to these third party payment processor's. Both of these third party companies have 'merchant accounts' - with built in shopping carts. So I use the shopping carts from third party merchant accounts - and let them worry about the SSL

As far as the two shopping carts, I 'sorta' remember that Agora was tricky to set up and did not have as many features as OSCommerce. But then again – I never really needed to add the merchant accounts so I'm not sure how easy/hard that would be to do with either of these.

But since I like to 'guess' – I think a person would need a lot of products (a small online Wal-Mart business) to justify the learning curve of using either of the shopping carts. And then my 'best guess' would be to use OSCommerce – I used their support forum and it's full of helpful people IMHO.

Just my 0.02&cent:

[Sheila]

I haven't used either one. To date my shopping cart needs have been very modest. In the interest of sharing resources, I use Mal's E. It's a very easy to use and free service. I pair it with PayPal but it will work with any merchant account as well.

Sheila

[midwest]

Go with osCommerce. Agora and its sisters are not really worth it, by the time you get it set to go you could have osCommerce working as well, and have 100 times the store. Plus the add-ons for osCommerce are great. The paypal plugin is a breeze, so easy you're not even sure its working at first, the IPN support also make it hands down the best cart for digital sales also.

I have a cart setup at
http://www.hillbloom.com
if you wish to look then ask questions. Half of what you see on the opening page are addons.

[Luke]

I've only used OSCommerce, it's very customizable. Tricky to setup, but once it's up it's very efficient.
my2cents