Post by port23user » Tue Feb 10, 2009 9:16 am

I'm deciding on a shopping cart for my store and have it down to OpenCart and PrestaShop.  If you've had experience with PrestaShop, what are the advantages/disadvantages of using OpenCart?  Thanks in advance.

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Post by jty » Tue Feb 10, 2009 10:46 am

I haven't tried Prestashop 1.1 Final. I got up to 1.1beta

Disadvantages of OC vs PS
* OC is not straight out of a box yet. This is changing
* Smaller community
* No/less template designers

Advantages of OC over PC
* Faster
* Easier
* Non-programmers like me can easily understand the code and make our own changes
* Can come into this forum and get developer help
* PS has pretty templates
* More standard modules. But OC is getting there too

Disadvantages of PS
* Bigger community but only if you understand French
* Not as hard to modify as Magento but I found it much harder than Open Cart

Why use Open Cart instead of Prestashop ?
Open Cart is faster (performance), easier to use, easier to modify and it's supported in English with English speaking developers offering coding help.
If you understand French, it may be a different story but I couldn't get any help because I can't speak French.

I originally chose Prestashop but left Prestashop when I found Open Cart

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Post by collector » Tue Mar 10, 2009 11:35 am

PS is friendly software, but bloated (in my humble opinion), just too many options and modules that aren't needed. I started with PrestaShop, built the store and tore it down, in favor of OC. Plus, PS is only XHTML traditional, where as OC is XHTML strict. I prefer scripts written in XHTML strict. Although, I must say, I like the looks of the storefront of PS better, along this the cool way the "add to cart" moves up. ONLY if there were no OC, then yes, I would choose PS over the others out there.

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Post by nde » Tue Mar 10, 2009 10:02 pm

It depends on what the user/shop owner needs.

Opencart cons:
- searches rely on javascript, that's obstrusive
- development is not yet finished (so a comparision doesn't make much sense yet)
Opencart pros:
- it feels rock solid to work with and to build your shop

Prestashop cons:
- the backend could be much better, that's where you spend most of your time
Prestashop pros:
- feature rich
- the fly-to-basket feature


On XHTML, if your don't serve your pages as application/xhtml+xml, then XHTML is useless. HTML 4.01 strict is the way to go.

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Post by Daniel » Wed Mar 11, 2009 3:00 am

"searches rely on javascript, that's obstrusive"

Javascript is an integrale part of HTML and web 2.0. Try filtering out countries and zones without it.

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Post by collector » Wed Mar 11, 2009 5:04 am

Yeah, that fly-to-basket is cool and good for the customer to see just where their order went.


On XHTML, if your don't serve your pages as application/xhtml+xml, then XHTML is useless. HTML 4.01 strict is the way to go.

Didn't know that, interesting.

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Post by Nahuel » Fri Mar 13, 2009 9:45 am

I was needed to design a cart and saw all the options around. After all, I've decided to use OpenCart.

Let's go ahead on the cons first, so we can pass they quickly:

1) It still have some less features than other carts (but as far as I can see, nothing that can't be done).
2) The community is still growing, and there aren't too much mods, skins and integrations. This is just only a matter of time.

Now, the pros:

1) Well coded and secure -> After reviewing (fast) the code, it seems very well designed.
2) Faster and light -> The front and the back are faster than average shopping cart pages, in addition the server load is very low.
3) Nice Original Design -> A main problem of the open source script is the design. They may be robust, but the design usually it's something you have to do on your own. The "default" theme of OC it's very pretty, and the back is nice and simple to use (something my clients ask)
4 - and for my most important) It's very well organized for the devs. to use it! Translate OC it's very easy (I'll submit my spanish translation soon). The template system it's perfect, the .tpls are perfectly used and you have full control over the design. In this matter, it's 100% better than PrestaShop or Magento. Take a free css template and try to integrate them to OC, PS and Magento. The estimated time for the same result with OC it's too less... I've saved a lot of time.

OpenCart for me it's the best free alternative, after trying Magento, Prestashop, OsCommerce, Zen Cart, etc.. some may have more features, but some of that features, it's likely you're never going to use them. For a well designed, secure, fast and simple (but powerfull) cart, I'll reccomend OpenCart all my life jeje.

Regards,
Nahuel

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Post by bikkuri » Mon Mar 08, 2010 7:58 am

Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but after reviewing almost all of the open-source eCommerce options out there, I've gone with OpenCart over PrestaShop for the reasons above, but with one addition: the admin interface!

If I'm going to be offering OpenCart as a solution to clients, who will be managing their inventory and processing orders through the back end, the interface OpenCart has is light-years better than PrestaShop, or almost any of the other options out there. I'm sure they can all be customized, but why spend the development time when OpenCart has it ready to go?

For what it's worth, Magento is, in my opinion, the second best option, if you have the server with the resources to handle it (which most people don't on standard hosting accounts). It's a crazy resource hog and needs some serious juice to get running anywhere near as quickly as OpenCart operates.

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Post by Daniel » Mon Mar 08, 2010 8:10 am

thank you!

and its only getting better!

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Post by wormytux » Mon Mar 08, 2010 4:13 pm

open cart is fast and easy to modify... plus user friendly admin panel... good for clients/non developers... ;D

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Post by jefrey1983 » Sun May 09, 2010 4:29 pm

opencart is way better the prestashop in many ways except for the template availability

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Post by i2Paq » Sun May 09, 2010 5:53 pm

jefrey1983 wrote:opencart is way better the prestashop in many ways except for the template availability
I rather have that then a shop with the template engine that PrestaShop has.

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Post by jefrey1983 » Mon Jun 07, 2010 3:41 am

Yes but a look is a +1 factor to a customer
i love the new look of opencart.com than the old opencart.com for example ;D
cons for me
prestashop lacks guest checkout , or you have to pay for it
opencart shopping cart does not include the shipping cost
would be nice if the information module would be display in default similar to this http://www.genglob.com/

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Post by Sheldmandu » Mon Jun 07, 2010 10:51 pm

I think from a design perspective OpenCart is definitely better than PrestaShop, but PrestaShop does have better modules, support and so on, mainly because it's backed by a company, in a similar way to Magento, while OpenCart is pretty much on the back of Daniel's efforts (who should very much be commended for the excellent architecture). If you're looking for something feature rich out of the box and don't need to do lots of extensions and integration with anything else, I would suggest you look at CSCart. It's not free, but it is Open Source and the license is a reasonable $285, while if you're a reseller it's only $150 I believe. Its very very feature rich. I don't know how buggy it is as I havn't used it, but I was thoroughly impressed with the features. It's got pretty much all the things I wish OpenCart had and I actually hope OpenCart can implement some of those features in time. So if you don't mind paying it's definately one worth checking out.

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Post by Daniel » Mon Jun 07, 2010 11:22 pm

I'm working on a extension system now where peopel can sell commerical extesnsions. hopefully this will make people more willing to produce extensiosn for OC.

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Post by Moggin » Tue Jun 08, 2010 4:27 am

Sheldmandu wrote:... PrestaShop does have better modules, support and so on, mainly because it's backed by a company....
I'm not sure: maybe it depends on your perspective. For my purposes, Prestashop didn't really have better modules. I'd have to pay to get (say) Sagepay, whereas Opencart just requires a couple of mouse clicks. Also, Opencart has a 'killer app' : the guest checkout- plus, of course, that classy admin interface cited by bikkuri.

There were not many themes for Prestashop, and if you fancied styling it yourself, get ready for 47 pages of CSS (vs OC's 10!) Argh. At one point I styled about 40 emails, for wording , and because the default email colour was Barbie pink. I didn't spot the controls in the admin panel till later...no documentation.

It was also difficult to find a developer who could work with Prestashop. Here on Opencart, there are quite a few people willing to offer commercial support.

I'm not meaning to knock Presta, because it is good; but you must be patient, skilled, and happy to negotiate the slightly scary admin interface. :o Opencart is a breath of fresh air after that.

And v 1.4.8..wow...!

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Post by rog_ashbury » Tue Jun 15, 2010 7:41 pm

I found one little feature that PS lacked and then stopped looking at it - Related Products

I sell products and I also want to sell accessories and consumables for them which are specific to each one. I also want to encourage my customer to consider buying higher in the chosen range at the point of placing the order.

Can't do those things in PS because Related Products isn't in there (not as far as I could see anyway after doing an install and looking at the front and back ends).

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Post by Chris P Duck » Tue Jun 22, 2010 12:00 am

After using several different open-source carts I think that main advantage of OC is that it's pretty easy to extend and add in new features. I've been a PHP developer for over 6 years but I think for people with less experience they'd find it fairly easy to work with the code, which is a massive benefit of it.

The base code is well written and it provides about 90%+ of what most people want from an ecommerce system - you could just install it and use it "as is" but writing new features is fairly straightfoward, and that's a huge advantage of it over others, particularly Magento and Oscommerce. :)

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Post by Joxe » Tue Aug 17, 2010 4:43 am

I globally like OC but I hope that in future releases it could turn more 'user friendly'. I think that if OC goes towards less experienced programming users it will grow its community even more. The idea is to set the shop almost just in the backend, without to have to edit PHP files or so...

Keep the good work! ;)

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Post by Qphoria » Tue Aug 17, 2010 4:56 am

Joxe wrote:I globally like OC but I hope that in future releases it could turn more 'user friendly'. I think that if OC goes towards less experienced programming users it will grow its community even more. The idea is to set the shop almost just in the backend, without to have to edit PHP files or so...

Keep the good work! ;)
There is no reason for non-technical people to have to edit anything already. Only in the case where you want something unique will there be changes that require editing php files

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