PrestaShop vs OpenCart

Hi,

I'm opening a new online store in a couple of weeks and I was wondering... Which is better: PrestaShop, or OpenCart? I like OpenCart very much, but it lacks some features that I really need in my shop. On the other hand... The backend of PrestaShop is very suitable for me, but the store loads slower and if I edit the (frontend) template, it often "breaks" (everything is messed up. The module positions, the text boxes, etc.).

But never mind that, I want to hear Your opinion. Which is better and why?

Thank you for sharing your experience with me.

hmm what are the features prestashop has and opencast not?

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gratita wrote:Which is better and why?

OpenCart is the best, why? Because this is the OpenCart forum.

Why base you choice on someone else's words if all that counts is your own experience.

Ever installed and tried OpenCart and/or PrestaShop?

gratita wrote:Hi,

I'm opening a new online store in a couple of weeks and I was wondering... Which is better: PrestaShop, or OpenCart? I like OpenCart very much, but it lacks some features that I really need in my shop. On the other hand... The backend of PrestaShop is very suitable for me, but the store loads slower and if I edit the (frontend) template, it often "breaks" (everything is messed up. The module positions, the text boxes, etc.).

But never mind that, I want to hear Your opinion. Which is better and why?

Thank you for sharing your experience with me.

Seems you answered your own question. You will only get biased answers here of course. Speed vs Features (features that could be added with mods perhaps)

Well you're in the OpenCart forum so of course you're going to get biased answers mostly.

I for one can be objective though.

I tried both PrestaShop and OpenCart, and settled on OpenCart. It's a lot easier to work with in my opinion. The backend is more intuitive. I found it hard to navigate around Presta's backend. Also it's easier to modify the code. While i'm no coding expert, i'm one hell of a "copy and paste" kinda guy. Give me some code to copy and paste and I can do it in OpenCart in seconds now. That most likely has to do with the file structure of OpenCart (thanks Daniel).

Also we have vQmod with OpenCart which means you don't have to modify core code anymore to add extensions. I finally wrapped my head around vQmod and have made several of my own vQmod files for my store (yay me). Not sure if PrestaShop has anything like that yet.

Finally the extensions here are a hell of a lot more affordable than they are on PrestaShops website. I think that's a big draw for OpenCart. In the end, it's mostly about the dollar, and if I can upgrade my store and make it a lot nicer than what it is for less, then I'm 9 times out of 10 gonna go with that solution, and OpenCart wins hands down on this one.

One thing I will say good about Prestashop though, is that company wise they are structured a lot better than OpenCart. They run it more like a business instead of an OpenSource hobby project. They have a whole team of employees who communicate with their customer base, and they even have yearly conferences in France for all their users, so if you live in Europe (or feel like paying an arm and a leg for a plane ticket) you can actually go meet and chat with them. I do like that aspect a lot.

Also, PrestaShop appears to be focusing on Mobile Commerce a lot now and have promised some default mobile compatibility with the script in upcoming versions. At the rate smart phone usage is growing, I think Mobile commerce is going to be the future. I'm not really sure where OpenCart stands on this because Daniel or Q have never really mentioned anything about mobile commerce, whereas PrestaShop has released a lot of stuff about their plans for it.

opencartisalright wrote: One thing I will say good about Prestashop though, is that company wise they are structured a lot better than OpenCart. They run it more like a business instead of an OpenSource hobby project. They have a whole team of employees who communicate with their customer base, and they even have yearly conferences in France for all their users, so if you live in Europe (or feel like paying an arm and a leg for a plane ticket) you can actually go meet and chat with them. I do like that aspect a lot.

well that is because prestashop is a business and not a hobby opensource project. And yes that has advantages and disadvantages.

Also, PrestaShop appears to be focusing on Mobile Commerce a lot now and have promised some default mobile compatibility with the script in upcoming versions. At the rate smart phone usage is growing, I think Mobile commerce is going to be the future. I'm not really sure where OpenCart stands on this because Daniel or Q have never really mentioned anything about mobile commerce, whereas PrestaShop has released a lot of stuff about their plans for it.

while not much has been said about this I imagine that the next major version will have some mobile stuff going on. It's really not all that difficult. Just a good mobile theme and a bit of redirect code in the right place. It's quite doable currently. I looked into doing a mobile theme utilizing the multi-store functionallity back on 1.4.x, but got pulled off on other projects. I may get back to it and include a vqmod with detection code so you don't have to use multi-store at some point. you cat get a look at what I was playing around with by pointing a mobile browser at http://m.spotonsolutions.net/demo/ I got a few basic things up there, but never finished it out.

Xsecrets wrote:while not much has been said about this I imagine that the next major version will have some mobile stuff going on. It's really not all that difficult. Just a good mobile theme and a bit of redirect code in the right place. It's quite doable currently. I looked into doing a mobile theme utilizing the multi-store functionallity back on 1.4.x, but got pulled off on other projects. I may get back to it and include a vqmod with detection code so you don't have to use multi-store at some point. you cat get a look at what I was playing around with by pointing a mobile browser at http://m.spotonsolutions.net/demo/ I got a few basic things up there, but never finished it out.

Thanks for the reply X.

That's a shame you never got around to finishing off your mobile projects. I've been reading so many statistics lately that show mobile commerce is growing at an amazing rate. Whether or not you love it or hate it, people nowadays like to be mobile and online, especially the younger generation. They don't want to sit behind a desktop all day and the fact the we now have the power of the internet in our hands, mobile commerce really needs to be looked at by OpenCart here soon.

Yes, mobile themes would be great, and I know it's quite doable now with the current version of OpenCart. I was thinking the same as you, get a mobile template, set up multi-store, and then have my 2nd mobile domain point to the mobile template. Seems easy enough. Except there aren't really a big selection of mobile templates. As far as I can tell it's only Algozone, and they haven't updated their templates for OC 1.5 yet.

But not only mobile templates for the front end, I'd really like to see a mobile template for the back end where we can manage our stores on the go. Snap a picture of a product and upload it directly from wherever your are, manage sales, edit products and categories, etc. etc. A mobile admin template if you will.

Really hope you get around to getting back to your mobile aspirations soon. I think it would be very lucrative for whoever creates an outstanding mobile ecosystem for OpenCart.

opencartisalright wrote:

Xsecrets wrote:while not much has been said about this I imagine that the next major version will have some mobile stuff going on. It's really not all that difficult. Just a good mobile theme and a bit of redirect code in the right place. It's quite doable currently. I looked into doing a mobile theme utilizing the multi-store functionallity back on 1.4.x, but got pulled off on other projects. I may get back to it and include a vqmod with detection code so you don't have to use multi-store at some point. you cat get a look at what I was playing around with by pointing a mobile browser at http://m.spotonsolutions.net/demo/ I got a few basic things up there, but never finished it out.

Thanks for the reply X.

That's a shame you never got around to finishing off your mobile projects. I've been reading so many statistics lately that show mobile commerce is growing at an amazing rate. Whether or not you love it or hate it, people nowadays like to be mobile and online, especially the younger generation. They don't want to sit behind a desktop all day and the fact the we now have the power of the internet in our hands, mobile commerce really needs to be looked at by OpenCart here soon.

Yes, mobile themes would be great, and I know it's quite doable now with the current version of OpenCart. I was thinking the same as you, get a mobile template, set up multi-store, and then have my 2nd mobile domain point to the mobile template. Seems easy enough. Except there aren't really a big selection of mobile templates. As far as I can tell it's only Algozone, and they haven't updated their templates for OC 1.5 yet.

But not only mobile templates for the front end, I'd really like to see a mobile template for the back end where we can manage our stores on the go. Snap a picture of a product and upload it directly from wherever your are, manage sales, edit products and categories, etc. etc. A mobile admin template if you will.

Really hope you get around to getting back to your mobile aspirations soon. I think it would be very lucrative for whoever creates an outstanding mobile ecosystem for OpenCart.

well as far as a template with multi-store it is very simple to do, I am honestly amazed that there aren't any out there. (I don't count algozone since I would never recommend anyone by one of their crap themes for anything.)
The problem with that is it forces you to have a wildcard ssl which is considerably more expensive. The best thing would be to have the browser detection code load a mobile theme on mobile browsers on the same domain. The code is pretty simple and shouldn't be too hard to implement. After that the only issue might be updating some of the payment modules like paypal to use their mobile stuff.

As far as admin goes I don't see that in the near future. It would be a very large project, and I really see it as mostly pointless. I really don't see to many people using mobile for administration. Maybe a tablet, but then they should work fairly well without a mobile version.

Xsecrets wrote:well as far as a template with multi-store it is very simple to do, I am honestly amazed that there aren't any out there. (I don't count algozone since I would never recommend anyone by one of their crap themes for anything.)

I'm quite amazed there aren't any really good mobile templates either, although I really have no idea about Algozone's templates. I've never bought one so I don't know the inner workings for them.

Xsecrets wrote:The problem with that is it forces you to have a wildcard ssl which is considerably more expensive. The best thing would be to have the browser detection code load a mobile theme on mobile browsers on the same domain. The code is pretty simple and shouldn't be too hard to implement. After that the only issue might be updating some of the payment modules like paypal to use their mobile stuff.

Yes, that is true. I actually bought a .mobi domain, and then I realized what a waste it was because everyone is using subdomains (m.yourshop.com) for their mobile sites. But even then, I guess you would still have to have a wildcard SSL since it's on a subdomain. Although wildcard SSLs aren't too terribly much nowadays. Godaddy had a pretty good deal on them awhile back, and HostGator's don't seem too bad. I guess if your making a lot of sales from mobile devices then the benefits would outweigh the costs. But of course you'd have to view your analytics and see how many mobile visitors you get to your site in order to judge whether or not a mobile site would be lucrative.

Xsecrets wrote:As far as admin goes I don't see that in the near future. It would be a very large project, and I really see it as mostly pointless. I really don't see to many people using mobile for administration. Maybe a tablet, but then they should work fairly well without a mobile version.

Well, I don't mean a full blown mobile admin panel on an iPhone. I think that would be a bit much. I'm talking more of a "lite" version. Like just something where we could say go out and take product pictures and upload them to our site immediately through a nice interface. Or view total daily sales, and change orders statuses. Simple things like that. There are a couple carts that offer this now. Paid of course, but nevertheless, it would be nice to have a "lite" mobile admin version.

opencartisalright wrote:I've been reading so many statistics lately that show mobile commerce is growing at an amazing rate.

Do you have them available? I know products like phone apps and ringtones have grown by massive rates but the info I found for regular ecommerce is less that 1/2 of 1% growth the last couple years.

That being said, it is something like 6% of sales. Plus positioning yourself as an early adopter of a rising trend can be extremely beneficial. Customers are already used to using your service by the time everyone else jumps in.

rph wrote:

opencartisalright wrote:I've been reading so many statistics lately that show mobile commerce is growing at an amazing rate.

Do you have them available? I know products like phone apps and ringtones have grown by massive rates but the info I found for regular ecommerce is less that 1/2 of 1% growth the last couple years.

That being said, it is something like 6% of sales. Plus positioning yourself as an early adopter of a rising trend can be extremely beneficial. Customers are already used to using your service by the time everyone else jumps in.

Of the limited statistics that I have for my main shop, mobile sales run at just under 4% - That is just iPhones (no other phones used to make a purchase) and excludes iPads.

I don't have a mobile template for the shop - it's not really that required for iPhones as they have such a large resolution, as to whether I am missing out on sales on other phones due to them not having as high a resolution I don't know. Get plenty of people looking around on various phones, only those using an iPhone actually purchase at the moment.

madimar wrote:hmm what are the features prestashop has and opencast not?

The ability to fill in product prices with tax included.

With OC, my customers are complaining that it takes a long time to calculate each of the product prices manually until 4 decimals to get the right price.

Definitely, there is no perfect shopping cart at all, and OpenCart is not ideal. But it has lots of positive comments round the internet. I am on PresataShop now, Hope, soon I’ll move to OpenCart, and I guess with cart2cart http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com , because it is much more effortless. The firs reason why is because it is possible to setup multiple tax zones. The second - it has lots of positive comments round the internet. So I hope it will suits my business the most. They persuade me, there is no need to be a highly professional programmer, it is easy to set up and manage store. Hope it will be the right choice