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Ask HN: Shopping cart advice?
1 point by rcharleswhite on March 22, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments
Hi everyone, I'm sure this question, or variants of it, has been asked before, so forgive me if this is repetitive.

I'm looking for advice on shopping carts. Googling is hard, because there is so much marketing speak and bad reviews.

I have five main requirements:

1) Non-Hosted. While we will not host the site in house, I want the flexibility of choosing my own hosting provider.

2) Easy to Design for or Skin. We will probably end up paying someone for a professional looking UI, and would like this to be as easy as possible.

3) Good set of included modules. We don't want to roll our own search, shipping, payment gateways, etc.

4) Unix based.

5) Extendable. Ideally the cart would be written in Java/PHP/Ruby/Python, and have a cleanish code base and some documention.

We are willing to spend money, probably up to $2000 USD. If anyone has any suggestions or additional points that should be thought of, I would much appreciate it.

Thanks, Charlie



Zencart was/is the leader, Magento is the newcomer but looks very strong.

Wordpress has very good shopping cart plugins in case you want to add a publisihing & advertising platform to your shop. (highly recommended!)

Also Shopify can be a solution.


No money is necessary, check out Magento (http://www.magentocommerce.com/). It's very flexible, fully open source, and has a very active community.


Thanks, Magento looks good. I will definitely keep looking at this.


ZenCart.




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