A Store Owner’s Experience with Zen-cart, Opencart , Prestas

A Store Owner’s Experience with Zen-cart, Opencart , Prestashop and magento e-commerce software

We have been a web store owner for several years and have used zen-cart, opencart, magento, prestashop trying to build up a web shop. The very first shop we tried to set up is sextoytrc.com, wth zen-cart in 2009. We were generally satisfied with it as it worked fine and received orders for us.

We encountered opencart after one year or so and surprisingly found that this software is just way better looking than zen-cart. So we searched through internet for the comparison of major open source e-commerce software online and read a lot about this. We then switched our store to opencart and were happier for two years.

Meanwhile, we still looked for other better alternatives and see if we could do better (opencart provides better out of the box SEO settings but still not enough for us). We have tried with prestashop and magento. Prestashop was really impressive as well. It provided a nice clean default theme and the SEO settings seemed to be sufficient. However, as we spent more time testing prestashop (maybe not enough time testing to get really familiar with it), we found its shopping cost setting really disappointed. Because we had to input more than 1,000 values to complete our shipping cost settings for different countries worldwide.

As for magento, it is really a masterpiece of e-commerce and I love it IF I HAD ENOUGH BUDGET! This boy just requires high end server hardware and better programming skill to run it well.

Now, we still stick to opencart. This is generally the ideal solution for our current needs.

Thank you for sharing this.