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I’m managing a mid-tier retail website. It is completely custom written code from scratch based on PHP/PERL/MySQL. We want to upgrade the shopping cart portion of the site to include some new features including a more robust coupon/discount management system, gift registry, and a commission system that gives customers credit for referring new customers by giving them a credit equal to a percentage of the new customer’s first purchase.
Trying to avoid reinventing the wheel as I know there are shopping carts out there with discount/coupon and gift registry features. I’m guessing though we’ll probably have to custom code the referral commission system though.
Here are the main requirements:
– Cart has to be in PHP and open source (we can modify it to our heart’s content).– Cost for code must be under $1000.– Must use MySQL for data storage– Code must be mature (have been in existence for at least a couple years with a sizeable user community of developers that use it.)– Must at least have a coupon/discount management module and some sort of Gift Registry/Wish List function.– Must have a well though-out streamlined Checkout process similar to Amazon.com or better.
We did some research a year ago and ended up going with X-Cart. However we got sidetracked on other projects and sort of abandoned trying to mod X-cart for several reasons.
1) They kept putting out security updates which were getting more and more cumbersome the more we modified the code. This would be a problem with any system we modify though. The problem really is that X-cart is the most popular PHP Shopping Cart so it is a BIG target for hackers. Is someone identifies your cart as an X-cart system then you are vulnerable to any well-published exploit that has not been patched. We’d ideally prefer a lesser known product that is close to being as robust as X-cart but less prone to exploits.
2) Their coding was not very straight-forward and there was absolutely no source code documentation for all the modules, subroutines, include files, templates. What a mess to have to figure out. But we did spend the time to do it.
3) Their checkout process was not well thought-out. This was very shocking for such a popular shopping cart. We spent many hours greatly improving the flow and layout of the checkout process based on many hours of A/B testing with our previous custom cart. Many of the modifications were simple common-sense things. Very disappointing that they didn’t put more brain power into designing a better checkout process.
It seems the only other alternative that had a good chance of meeting our requirements was CubeCart. But here I am a year later, about to take the plunge and either dive back into X-cart or try something else. Really hate to have to spend the time to build something from scratch, but if there isn’t a PHP Open Source product out there with it’s act together, then maybe I have no choice?