Choosing the right E-Commerce system

I just thought I would post this guide for anyone trying to choose a shopping cart system.

Before choosing a shopping cart you should first write down all the features you can think of that your business might need.

You then have 3 options:

1. Off the shelf
2. Off the self and customise.
3. Custom built application.

OpenCart is an "Off the self" system that you have the option of customising. OpenCart is built to satisfy the general populace of shopping cart needs. There is no one alternative system out there that can fulfill all needs.

At best all you can hope for is something that is easy to customise and is incredible fexilible. This is the what OpenCart is aiming for.

About customisation: It is indeed one of Opencart's strength thanks to the MVC design, where the templates and CSS can easily be customised as needed.

What I have been struggling with at times is with contributions which modify core files. For instance, two contributions A and B (they don't know each other) modify menu.php. Ideally, this should be done by extending the class and then overriding the appropriate method. This is fine as long as it is only one class doing so but becomes problematic when several contributions try to extend the same core class. I don't know whether there is a solution for this problem.

The solution would be if the system identifies the template hesitate a folder type and configuration to include the code in a class or something
I am developing a management system for the system Thema identify if there is a folder in the setup and make the import of settings
settings would be saved in a database instance: setting_template equal to the setting

OpenCart also is great for Pagerank I've used many scripts, example-Magento-has clear SEO urls..but ..only when i changed to OpenCart my store is now No1 in google by keywords i need. And i did nothing to get this. I don't even care about keywords, meta descriptions
So for those who thinks that opencart urls is not good-think again

tommix wrote:OpenCart also is great for Pagerank I've used many scripts, example-Magento-has clear SEO urls..but ..only when i changed to OpenCart my store is now No1 in google by keywords i need. And i did nothing to get this. I don't even care about keywords, meta descriptions
So for those who thinks that opencart urls is not good-think again

Tommix, that's great for you. I guess it is probably to do with the fact that OpenCart is so Fast....! There has been a lot of talk over the past months that Search Engines favour lightening fast sites, which OpenCart definitely is from what I have seen so far. Saying that, it would be great to have an easy way to create SEO friendly and content relevant urls, and do it properly (ie. forwarding, no duplicate urls etc) so many carts offer this but never get it 'just right'.