Determine best option of ecommerce for me

Hello everyone, I was just referred to this site (opencart) but a friend. I am a web designer and I work on several ecommerce sites a year. I have been using OsCommerce and Zencart in the past, but I am not 100% happy mainly because I find it difficult to customize, manage and not very user-friendly (both frontend + backend).

So I am looking for an alternative, and I actually like the fact that opencart looks very easy to use (hopefully customize), and I love the front end and backend look.

I am wondering if some of you guys can briefly tell me some of your experiences with opencart and also if you made the switch from another ecommerce open source... this would be greatly appreciate it so to help me make my decision.

PS. I am downloading it now of course to test drive everything and create my own experience with it. Thank you

Rod

I only have experience using Shopify which has worked really great for me so far. Another option is using paypal seller account.

I develop sites too and got tired of working with the other solutions out there (paid and free). OpenCart is very light weight and has a LOT of great features. You may have to install a few mods to get everything that you want, but most of them are done through VQMod, so it's very easy. The site is extremely easy to move from your server to the clients server after you've finished developing it for them and it's got the capability to run multiple stores.

So far, I've seen the "closing" ratio of sales to be a lot higher with this cart and the average purchase price has been higher. To me, the one page checkout and guest checkout are a couple (many more can be found) of great features.

Thank you both for the answers. It does seem like a really clean and effective system. I ran my first installation in just a few minutes and had everything up and running. Now I think the challenging part will be to actually customize the look of it to match my design, so I'll have to do a little digging and researching.

Anyone else other thoughts/experiences? they will be greatly appreciated

I like the idea of this cart being so light, what concerns me before trying it would be security issues being that it's so lite. Has anyone had any problems with that?

asdco wrote:I like the idea of this cart being so light, what concerns me before trying it would be security issues being that it's so lite. Has anyone had any problems with that?

That's certainly a good point... but I don't have enough experience to even begin to respond on this. Hope others can share experiences (hopefully great ones in terms of security).

well, it may or may not be an issue I am just security conscious these days with all the hackers at work. I've used all the other top heavy carts which have huge file systems and can get risky because its so easy to lose track of what files you forget to reset the security on, that becomes a problem also.

I've been using Shop-Script PREMIUM (now WebAsyst Shop-Script) until 2 years ago (was using it for 3 years), but then I got in touch with OpenCart, and I'll never change it for something else