Is OpenCart a good choice for startup ?

Hi, I'm about to open a new online store and my budget is quite limited. One of my options is OpenCart. I've searched for the review of this platform and there are numerous bad feedbacks about this platform. However, those comments and posts were 2-3 years ago. Then I cam across a review blog post about OpenCart and it said all the good things like OpenCart is very to use, it has fast loading speed, or it provides a complete set of metrics and reports. And this blog post is quite recently, it has just been updated in September 2020. Here is that blog post.

So I'm very confused right now. The nearest article about OpenCart that I can fìnd saying the platform is good, while reviews on other social media like quora or reddit mainly state that it's bad but those reviews were posted long ago. I wonder whether OpenCart has updated to be better or what?

Have anyone currently using the platform can give me real, updated reviews about it?

I really need help since I'm totally new to OpenCart and don't want to waste my investing money on something that will not work.

Thank you in advance.

alexken123 wrote: ↑

Mon Jul 22, 2024 10:38 am

Have anyone currently using the platform can give me real, updated reviews about it?

OpenCart is still one of the very best ecommerce platforms available! It's fast, it's simple, it's got thousands of great extensions.

As well as using it to build client sites, we run it on our own stores such as: https://www.vapeliquiduk.com/

If you want an open source, totally customisable ecommerce solution then it's the best way to go by a mile.

In my opinion when you start looking at any shopping cart you should try them out if possible. With opencart I would say use 3.0.3.9 as your test. Also evaluate what you need from a cart. Some might need basic stuff - i.e. admin adds things to the cart and keeps track of stock levels themselves, you don't have a lot of customizable products, and you accept major payment processors that are available with the platform.

Opencart 2.x.x.x versions were very good because they came with a lot of extensions built in for all sort of shipping and payment methods. 3.x.x.x versions changed that model to needing to download extensions from the marketplace. A lot of them not free anymore.

With that said draft up a list of needs for using a shopping cart and see if opencart fills most of those needs. Then if not, see what is available from the market place for some of the things it doesn't fill.
Lastly for the "must have" things that are not included or available from the marketplace maybe put out feelers to developers to see how much it might cost to make an extension that fills the gap.

But I have been using opencart since 2013 and we are still here 11 years later. Should tell you something positive about opencart.

Mike