Give me advice on installing an ecommerce shopping cart.

March 31, 2009 2:40 PM

Need advice on pitfulls/things to look for when installing a shopping cart on an ecommerce platform.

I am a PHP programmer with moderate experience (500 hours) and am wondering about the pitfalls of installing a shopping cart. I have been given the task and know more or less nothing about it. The person commissioning the job wants to use paypal, but wants to use a merchant account (ie doesn't want user to have to sign up for a paypal account. Possible?). I am thinking about zen cart and oscommerce as those seem to be the biggest.

Feel free to offer any advice even if it doesn't fall strictly withing the boundaries of the question.

posted by zorro astor to computers & internet (8 comments total)

Incidentally, this is a site that sells advertising packages, so there is no stock to keep track of.
posted by zorro astor at 2:55 PM on March 31

We user Ubercart. Things to be aware of from a business perspective - any merchant account provider (Heartland, etc) will need to run a validation process on your system before giving you credentials. You can't complete a real transaction without credentials. Find out what the criteria are from your merchant account provider NOW, so you are not suprised by anything they are looking for.

Make sure you have a proper tax calculation table for the region you are in and the regions you will be shipping to. Also make sure that any coupon/discount module you may install works for both pre and post-tax discounts or whatever your business people may be thinking in terms of running discount promotions. We had problems with this too late and had to abandon the ability to run discounts at launch.

Make sure you have all the detailed requirements from the biz...like, do they want to validate for real shipping addresses at check out? This doesn't come default with a lot of carts/transaction systems but needs to be custom plugged in to UPS or USPS. For example, does the cart validate the zip code provided against the State selected? Some don't. That's a pain in the ass.

The pain the ass is in the details. Avoid this by getting as much info from the biz first.
posted by spicynuts at 2:59 PM on March 31

Oh, just saw your comment. Does that mean no shipping either? If so, that removes a huge headache. The transaction validation from the merchant provider still applies though.
posted by spicynuts at 3:00 PM on March 31

Yes there is no shipping.

We will be going through Paypal as the provider, but as I said, the user will not have to sign up for an account.
posted by zorro astor at 3:19 PM on March 31

Zen Cart is horrible to restyle, and its code/architecture is just awful (OsCommerce doesn't seem any better). ZenMagick can help, but it's still a messy job and I don't think I'd touch another Zen Cart project unless someone threw a lot of money at me.

If you're only selling a limited range of packages with limited options then you might be better off building it yourself, integrating with PayPal is pretty easy.
posted by malevolent at 12:00 AM on April 1

I've been going through this process for the last couple of weeks (web dev who hasn't done ecommerce before). For what its worth, I went with ZenCart because it's very configurable (especially if you have PHP skills) and the forums are very active (plus there are a lot of useful modules for added functionality). It is a bit of a beast to restyle, but at least it is mostly css as opposed to tables in the first place. A plus point is that it's fairly SEO friendly in the first place (and the free SimpleSEO plugin takes it a lot further in that respect).

It took me about a week to restyle zen using my existing html/css layout - I'm afraid I can't link to it because it's still a work in progress. A lot of zencart installations do look very samey but it IS entirely possible to get a decent modern looking site set up with a bit of work. The templating system is quite well thought out.

A negative point to consider is that there is a 2.0 release pending though, which looks like it will be a fairly major (much needed!) change, but right now it's not released and it will probably be in alpha for some time. So you would probably have to do some moderately significant upgrading late this year when 1.38 stops being supported officially.

I also considered Magento which looks lovely (very web 2.0) but I personally backed away from it because it's early days yet and I needed to be sure of Protx support. I'm sure there is a Paypal advanced web transactions solution for it already though.

You should definitley sign up for a Paypal developer test accoutn and start mucking about with the code. Print out there tech documentation and read it though before you start, there are some hurdles with currency support etc you might need to consider.

Good luck! Feel free to memeail me if you have more specific questions about ZenCart.
posted by jzed at 1:28 AM on April 1

Oh, I forgot to add - yes it is possible to have a Paypal setup that doesn't require login on the user's part - this is either 'Payflow Payment Gateway' (if you have your own internet merchant account already) or 'Website Payments Pro' if you need paypal to take care of everything. You DON'T want 'Website Payments Standard' because the transaction takes place through Paypal and (nearly always) requires login. There are transaction fees associated with each type of account that your client should be informed of (if they don't know already). Start reading more here.
posted by jzed at 1:36 AM on April 1

We use OSCommerce and it is fine. It was customizable enough to look like the rest of our website. If you go to my profile and then click on "shop now," you can see what it looks like. I update it, although someone with OSC experience built it. We have a lot of different, one-off items, and although it's not difficult to add items, it is somewhat time consuming and so we don't list even 10% of what we have in our physical store. The store payments are accepted through PayPal, so you might be able to check that out when viewing source. Finally, I think PayPal has some decent instructions on making the connection. Good luck!
posted by battlecj at 11:02 AM on April 3