OpenCart Review
Review this cart!
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| Company name |
OpenCart |
| Product name |
OpenCart |
| Version |
1.4.7 |
| Sample customer sites |
http://www.timeforfitness.co.uk/
http://www.bicibene.com/
http://www.genglob.com/
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| Price |
Free |
| Average review score |
(23) |
| User reviews |
Reviewed by: tobul
"I tryed magento-too much code and not easy to use. prestashot- no forum support at all, look like site before 6 years.
Opencart gave me everything...really good, easy to use, looking good-for small-medium sites this is the best."
Review date: January, 2012 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: John
"I used it for a year and then went to upgrade and it was hell. Ended up deleting it after I got nasty abuse from the developers on the so called support forum.
Sure it's nice and easy to use but do a web search first and see what people are saying it has the worst support I have seen on the web in my 15 years online."
Review date: December, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: John
"This cart had some good reviews so I installed it and used it for almost a year. The Shop does look good out of the box and has tons of useful features. The Cart uses an MVC DRY approach, the code is pretty clean and the installer is intuitive and simple to use. From a user/administrators perspective, there is never any 'stable' release because there is never any bug fix releases. New features get bundled into every release so there is always a high risk those new features will have bugs (all the 1.5.X versions I used did). Some of the user input is not validated correctly and in some case this can actually create malformed product links (developer is aware but says it isn't a bug). This product has a sole developer so expect support delays as his main income is from bespoke development work.
In summary; NOT a good choice if you want a safe, stable shopping cart. If you are a developer and are prepared to roll your own bug-fixes then it might be a usable base."
Review date: December, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Tissy
"Opencart is the best of all. I used OSC for a while and tried a few others also. Now I have been using Opencart for our very successful online store www.tmart.in. Opencart is just excellent!!!"
Review date: November, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Jason
"I'm the lead developer for a company that builds a lot of ecommerce sites. I have implemented this cart for our company even though it is not perfect.
Pros:
1-clean, MVC code
2-lightweight. not bloated (all opensource competitors I'm aware of are very bloated)
3-using caching by default
4-clean/organized/intuitive code architecture.
5-loads/runs fast, and is customized with relative ease
6-installation is quick and painless
7-its free/opensource.
8-the cart looks fantastic by default (good layout)
9-the admin panel is clean and doesn't have the bloat of most competitors
10-the vast majority of options in the cart are options you'll need (except i find wishlist and reward points annoying)
cons
1-upgrades are difficult and backward compatibility is not respected. however, this helps prevent the cart from getting bloated. i guess its a 2 edged sword.
2-if you customize it, the software architecture is written in a way that forces you to edit the core (e.g. he labeled classes "final" that should NOT have been labeled this way).
3-the creator is a bit rude to people i've seen giving very candid, gentle feedback.
4-the config files are weird. maybe this helps the cart run slightly faster, although it does make the cart less flexible (i need a completely different config for my local machine vs the remote server).
5-there are a few security issues on occasion, like one with paypal IPN although according to the creator this has been addressed
Overall, this is not a perfect cart. However, in spite of it's many warts I have decided to use this as our opensource cart. My reasoning? the competitors are full of bloated crap that my clients don't need. I can install this cart pretty quickly, although it does require customization to get it working properly. If you're a professional developer and comfortable with MVC you can do a lot with this cart. keep in mind, this is a somewhat newer cart and the core code is relatively simple--from what I have se"
Review date: October, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Rajendra
"I worked almost on all top open source shopping carts including Prestashop, OScommerce etc but I really like the architecture of the OC as well as its coding style. Its really secure and fast cart. "
Review date: September, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Ish Kumar
"Application architecture is really bad, basic customization are really difficult. They way model and lang files are loaded just not good.
The way lang variables are passed to view is really bad because it takes modifying hell lot of thing to add 1 line of text. Product options section is difficult to customize as well due to HABTM relationships.
If you are looking to customize core of this cart, choose something else ... "
Review date: July, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Jim
"OC is relatively new to the e-commerce scene. It has had many revisions over the past year and has grown to be a GREAT CART! I have been using this cart since almost it's beginning and though it has had it's ups and downs it doesn't get any easier than this cart to set up, run, design, and tweak to your liking. The support is actually very good contrary to some post here. I highly recommend OC for your shopping Cart needs. I have worked with all the major open source carts and there's no doubt I've lost more hair using them. Right now I'm working over a client site with Zencart... I'll be balled before I'm done. If OC had the ability to interface with Quickbooks I'd have him using OC in a second. OC is better than all of them and only getting better. The frame work it's built on can't be beat. If you can't get OC running right out of the box in 5 min. then you probably should not be trying to set up any other cart without someone holding your hand... really it's easy, stable, and secure. The only reason not to use OC is if there is a feature it doesn't have yet, but I can't imagin what that could be for 99% of on-line stores. BTW, OC is NOT just for UK shoppers as one stated in their review... it's a multi-language multi-currency Shopping Cart. Use it and find out how good this cart really is, you'll be glad you did."
Review date: May, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: ember
"Use it about 2 years, great cart with excellent support. I never paid for modules, themes, etc. because there are free ones. I think this is the best free cart."
Review date: January, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: JHH
"I have used, and developed for, the three that are normally compared - Opencart, Prestashop and Magento. Of the three I feel that Opencart is the best at present (version 1.4.9.3).
It is well coded and feature rich, but not bloated. There are also a lot of extra modules (free or paid) on the opencart site. It is also great if you have lots of product options.
It is definitely the least buggy, and really is easy to set up. And keep going.
There is plenty of help on the forum (people who are ignored tend to be rude or asking off topic questions).
It is very fast up to about 200 categories and several thousand products on the average host package (which is similar to the others in reality). As with all three, make sure your web hoster has the MySQL server on the same server, if it is not it can really slow all of these carts down!
If you develop sites for customers, the massive advantage of opencart is the admin interface, it looks a lot more professional, and is easier to use, and in my experience that makes a huge different to customers. Someone who is not an expert has no trouble managing the store.
Of the three there seems to be more direction on where it is going too.
As is the way with these things, in twelve months time another one may have taken the lead. For the time being it is Opencart for me."
Review date: January, 2011 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Glys
"Cart is very good, nice looking and very easy to use.
Forum and support is awful! As much as I would love to use this software for a store that I plan to open, I will not do it because I am not an expert in this type of technology so I would need to be going for support very often and what I have seen in their forum is terrible. Good, polite, understanding support makes a big difference in the way a product is seen and to my eyes, Open Cart gets a rating of incomplete because if there is not a place to go for answers to one's question, the product worth nothing.
"
Review date: November, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Jeremy
"I used OpenCart for a little over two months. In that amount of time I spent more time on learning how to add this file, modify that file, upgrade this file, and change that file than I actually spent on marketing and selling my products! Not that I don't like to learn new things. It was interesting reading up on php and mySQL (what OpenCart is built on), but looking back it was a serious waste of time. I could have used that time to actually make money instead of spend it.
To elaborate on that, yes, OpenCart is open source software and free to use, but the options that come with it leave a little to be desired. If you want to actually upgrade your cart to, you know, look and do some of the things that other shopping cart solutions do, then you gotta pay a third party developer for an extension (or modification).
They do have quite a large group of people who develop all kinds of wonderful extensions that make the cart better, and to give them credit there are some very useful free 3rd party extensions available, but for the more serious extensions you usually have to pay someone for it. Also, you are responsible for searching through all the extensions, downloading them, uploading them to your site, making sure they work, figuring out why if they don't, etc. etc. It takes a lot of time, and there's no guarantee that one extension won't break another extension (or your cart) and so on.
While it might seem like you are getting a good deal, you usually end up paying more for extra themes (OpenCart only comes with 1 default theme), extensions, modifications, etc. I ended up spending close to $200 on my cart (and I wasn't even finished with it yet) before I started to realize "At this rate i'm gonna end up paying more for this free cart than I would if I used a paid shopping cart service that already offers all these things built in!"
Bottom line, if I had known 2 months ago what I know now, I would have saved the hassle & just gone with a paid cart to beg"
Review date: October, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Garry
"I have used this software for the last 6 months and have had no problems.
Anyone who has tried before should try the latest version (1.4.9.1) as the software has been updated and any bugs resolved.
Anyone looking for a shopping cart should try this, I believe they will not be dissapointed."
Review date: October, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Terry
"problems with 1.4.7 that was ignored in the forum as my help request posts were locked and PM ignored, had to downgrade to 1.4.4 to get a working version, but small problems with this which again is been ignored and they are even going to release a version 1.4.8 when they dont even have any current stable versions. "
Review date: May, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.7
Reviewed by: Alex
"This is great cart.
I checked the code and it is organize very well.
Very easy to use and extend.
Great job!!"
Review date: April, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.3
Reviewed by: Morris & Philips
"Its an excellent piece of software. I have seen some bad reviews and i would think thats absolute nonsense. I would also say this from my personal experience -
1. Excellent software
2. Easy to Use
3. Easy to Configure
4. Plenty of help out there if you ask.
5. Its absolutly production ready since there are already more than few people using it. We are going into production this weekend.
6. Knowledge in PHP will sure help the customizations you need.
7. There are several templates available to choose from free to paid.
Bottom Line - Try it you will be pleased"
Review date: April, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.4.3
Reviewed by: Jack
"So many bugs make it not usable for a serious production. The forums are absolutely disgusting and unhelpful. I would never endorse this product and it's a shame, as it had great potential."
Review date: February, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.3.3
Reviewed by: jeremy
"I have worked with a few shopping carts and opencart is my favorite so far. It does have some bugs, it doesn't have every feature that other carts have, but as a programmer it is very easy to understand and make changes to. It is so much better than Magento in that regard. Not a whole lot had to be done to use in the US, I'm not sure what the other person was talking about. A couple forms had to be changed, but they were easy edits that an html coder could do. In any case I would recommend it to anyone who knows php. If not, hire someone who does. You will pay a lot more for work on prestashop or magento because they are extremely buggy and much more difficult to customize."
Review date: January, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.3.3
Reviewed by: Marshall
"Had tested 1.3.0 and it was pretty good. Upgraded to 1.3.4 and there are so many bugs it is not funny. Just go to the forum board and search around a bit. The unfortunate part is OC builds one of the nicest store fronts of the 7 carts I tested. Right now I can not recommend it"
Review date: January, 2010 Version reviewed: 1.3.3
Reviewed by: admin
"We looked at many carts before finalizing on this cart for providing a complete solution."
Review date: October, 2009 Version reviewed: 1.3.3
Reviewed by: TOMMY
"New verison of opencart is very nice, sample and powerful! with lot of improvement recently, I am 100% sure opencart is the best shopping cart compare to others!"
Review date: August, 2009 Version reviewed: 0.7.1
Reviewed by: Greg
"We initially selected this cart because it has great graphics, a good administrator control panel, and a clean, simple user interface. However after spending several days customizing it (at a significant cost), we realized we can't use it without completely rewriting major sections. It's designed for use by customers in the United Kingdom. To take orders from anywhere else (like the United States), you have to design your own order forms (high-end carts typically change the order form based on the country you select). It was very difficult to charge a sales tax for the state where we do business and very hard to add different levels of shipping (like FedEx, USPS and UPS). Support for downloadable files is very limited. For example there is no simple way to deliver an unlock code for software or ebooks. This cart appears to be developed and supported by one person who does not respond to emails, but offers assistance for a fee. There are limited instructions and it takes hours to find and edit the multiple PHP files needed to customize the appearance. Finally Juniper Networks says Opencart is vulnerable to hackers (although this may now be corrected in later versions).
"
Review date: July, 2009
Reviewed by: PHPUSA
"new vision 1.X got lot of features! I can't believe how easy and powerful this cart is!"
Review date: May, 2009
Add Your Own Review |
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Shopping Cart Reviews Comments
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OpenCart is a open source shopping cart that's having a good shot at taking the open source crown from the established players like osCommerce and ZenCart. It has many nice out of the box features. Some less common ones include product level time limited sales, and good localization support. Some little annoying things include the very user unfriendly use of sort order everywhere (what happened to a nice AJAX sorting interface?). The default URLs are decidedly SEO unfriendly which is a pity. This should really be set to SEO friendly by default. However, overall, this is a strong candidate to take over from the grandfathers of open source carts.
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| Supported operating systems |
Windows, Linux, Unix |
| Language |
PHP |
| Database |
MySQL |
| Source code |
Yes |
| Reseller discounts |
No |
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| Product limit |
No |
| Category limit |
No |
| Multi-language |
Yes |
| Gift certificates |
No |
| Loyalty program |
No |
| Email merchant on order |
Yes |
| Affiliates program |
3rd party |
| Site search |
Yes |
| Search optimization tools |
Yes |
| Product reviews |
Yes |
| Newsletters |
Yes |
| Discount coupons |
Yes |
| Customer registrations |
Yes |
| Wish list |
No |
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| Shipping price range |
Yes |
| Shipping weight range |
Yes |
| UPS lookup |
No |
| USPS lookup |
Yes |
| Fedex lookup |
3rd party |
| Canada Post lookup |
3rd party |
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| Tax by state |
Yes |
| Tax by country |
Yes |
| PayPal |
Yes |
| Authorize.Net |
Yes |
| Verisign |
Yes |
| Worldpay |
Yes |
| Secure Trading |
No |
| Others |
Yes |
| Non credit card options |
Yes |
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| Customer forums |
Yes |
| Free support |
Yes |
| Paid support |
Yes |
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| Sales reports |
Yes |
| Search reports |
No |
| Low stock reports |
No |
| Inventory reports |
No |
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Last updated:
02 Feb 2012
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