5 reasons why oscommerce is a nightmare
By Justin Silverton
What is Open Commerce?
From oscommerce.com: “osCommerce is the leading Open Source online shop e-commerce solution that is available for free under the GNU General Public License. It features a rich set of out-of-the-box online shopping cart functionality that allows store owners to setup, run, and maintain their online stores with minimum effort and with no costs, license fees, or limitations involved.
The goal of the osCommerce project is to continually evolve by attracting a community that supports the ongoing development of the project at its core level and extensively through contributions to provide additional functionality to the already existing rich feature set.”
Why Shouldn’t I use it?
1) no separation of logic and presentationSmaller applications can be created without separating logic and presentation, but when an application gets as large as oscommerce, there needs to be some kind of templating system in place.
A templating system can also be used to cache dynamic pages and improve the overall performance.A good, scalable system needs to be engineered from the ground up. It looks to me like it was hacked together with pieces of code here and there
2) difficult to integrate into an existing design
out of the box, the cart works fairly well. If you want to make any drastic design changes, you will run into major issues.
Although it is free, and this may be intising to many companies, the time and labor cost of updating the cart to suit your needs ends up being more than many of the commerical carts available.
3) security
although it is updated, #1 makes it very difficult to make updates without having to manually open up each .php file and make the changes yourself.
4) cannot have multiple sizes of image previews (thumbnail, medium, large)
5) admin navigation issues
a) hard to do shipping cost per item (with different items having different costs) per country
b) editing product descriptions seems a little awkward. overall, it looks like it was developed for a programmer, rather than a store owner.
commercial
cubecart - http://www.cubecart.com/
sunshop - http://www.turnkeywebtools.com/
miva mercant - http://www.miva.com
open source
interchange - http://www.icdevgroup.com/
Followup
Another alternative to Oscommerce is a fork of the original project called Zen Cart. It is also freely available and can be downloaded here: http://www.zen-cart.com/
16 Comments so far
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Its funny that I found this article now because I had just got oscommerce installed and was looking at it to make the ui fit inside of my current site design. Its a nightmare for doing this. I definately have to find different software but I wasn’t to impressed from the looks of the ones that you have listed off. time to keep looking. Tnx
i am Russian and was looking for some adjustments for oscommerce…
and i just found out that the main version of oscommerce is not supporting for very long time, but there is alot of alternative compilation of main engine with some useful additional modules.
And this compilations has all problems fixed cause alot of users using and testing them
just find one for you and enjoy !
VAD
Can anyone post on his/her experience with Zen Cart? I had a look at it a while ago and was always keen on implementing it.
We’ve been using CRE LOADED in most of our production, an offshoot of osCommerce (like Zen Cart). It’s much more advanced than OsCommerce, and it uses a templating system. Granted, it can get frustrating when working with the internals, but the setup is much much better than OsCommerce ever will be.
I have not used osCommerce for any projects, though I have used ZenCart for a few. Before settling on ZC, I did alot of research and osCommerce was one of the apps I looked into. I kept running into comments like this post though, so i did not feel inclined to invest time into osCommerce. Overall, I’m happy with ZC, but I really don’t like the template override system. Upgrades are a nightmare, and like osCommerce, if you want any kind of intensive layout customization, be sure to set aside at least 3 times the number of hours you think it will take you. Maybe it’s not coded perfectly, but I really think developers need to look at the WordPress model more: wicked and easy templating, and a plugin system that is intuitive. As far as I know, ZenCart is the best and most featured open source PHP e-commerce app out there, but I’d be happy if someone points me in the direction of something superior!
Thanks.
If anyone is interested in checking out CRE LOADED (another fork of osCommerce, here is the url: http://www.creloaded.com
>> Can anyone post on his/her experience with Zen Cart?
I would say Zen Cart is only marginally better than osCommerce. They forked off of osCommerce, and the code is largely still a nightmare, all spaghetti style. Templating is a little easier, but still quite a bit of a pain. They have a system that they claim you can use to “override” parts of the application, but in truth you can really only override the default template. You cannot override existing application functionality. There are a few other things that the override system can do, but largely it is just a “template” system, if you can even call it that. The newer 1.3.x series is getting a little bit better, and they have introduced something of an observer/notifyer system into some parts of the core application. And also as Sam said, upgrades are a nightmare to do if you’ve got any kind of customization going on.
The team also does not seem to have much of a concrete direction other than to fill it with as many features as they can, which is leading them to truly over-bloated code. On a default install, loading the index page uses over 800 MySQL queries… Yikes! They also still carry around alot of osCommerce baggage. It has been something around 2 years since they forked off of osCommerce, and by now they could have freed themselves of all that baggage if they wanted to, but I think they are more interested in seeing how many features they can flood it with without a lot of concern over quality.
But I think I have to agree with Sam that Zen Cart is probably the best open source PHP eCommerce application at the moment. And that is not so much a compliment to Zen Cart as it is a criticism at the state of open source PHP eCommerce applications.
Although I am developing an open source PHP 5 eCommerce application that will be flexible and friendly to developers, designers, and store owners; I don’t really know when it will be finished since I am currently developing it on my own in my spare time. But if I may quote Bob Dylan, the times, they are a-changin’
I agree with you there. I tried zen cart a couple of weeks ago and leaves much to be desired. I think it’s great that you are working on an alternative!
Zencart is a great piece of software, unlike oscommerce, it is still supported and many users are adding new contibutions for various add-ins on a regular basis. It is not an easy cart to set up, right out of the box, as you will need an understanding of css for most of the style modifications, and it would help to have a bit of general knowledge of php. But if you want something that is free, and highly customisable you cannot go past zencart. My website is still under some modifications, and has taken me about 3 weeks to set up, without any knowledge of PHP.
The more I use it, the more I like it, it just takes time to get familiar with its structure and overides system. But if you want a site to be completely customised, zencart is the way to go.
Zencart is nothing more than OSCommerce with a nice pretty new dress which the developers pretend is a template system. The so called Dev team are rude control freaks and stamp on anyone who contributes anything they cannot control. The developers are devoid of creativity and hung up on squeezing every penny from their forum members, but they try to make it look as if they are doing people a favour. A team of professional writers offered to create documentation and set up their own forum, but the Zencart Dev team refused to work with them. Then they got someone else to write a book and self-publish it at a ridiculous price because some of the proceeds go to Zencart. They refuse to put it out in electronic format and when the code is updated the book is out of date.
Zencart is just as much a nightmare to customise as OSCommerce, with language files everywhere. To be honest, OSCommerce has more contributions and templates than zencart and there is not much to choose between them - both are badly coded and horrible to customise.
Cubecart is better for people starting out and Virtuemart is a much better offering although without the abundance of plugins. Avoid Zencart like the plague unless you have a few months to spare and a very thick skin when using their forums.
I have been looking for a *good* shopping cart solution for 6+ years. It is amazing to me that such an incredibly common & important ‘net function has such poor solutions available. I’ve OSCommerce and several of it’s step-children - CRE Loaded, Zen-Cart and X-Cart. They are all horribly written, just really amazaingly poor software design. In this age of really good Open Source software, it simply baffles me why we don’t have better options.
The ZC fans are very proud of the “overrides”, just as the X-Cart guys are very proud of their use of “Smarty”. Both are awful. In ZC, the admin pages are a joke - every page and module seems to have a completely different paradigm for configuration - radio buttons, integer codes, multi-level web-forms - all are used, and some have absolutely zero contextual instructions or help. If you touch any of the X-Cart code, you can forget about upgrades - you will be using merge & comparison tools and praying it will work when you are done.
Where have all the software engineers gone?
OSCommerce is a waste of everyone’s time. Who wants a storefront that cant be customized?
I have the misfortune of having inherited an OSCommerce site and was stupid enough to stick with it for another project.
We live and learn.
So, who wants to start a new open source shopping cart project? If all of the PHP offerings out there suck so bad, let’s stop complaining and start designing (no coding yet! That was apparently OSCOmmerce’s problem).
I’m an experienced developer but I’ve only been coding PHP for a year or so, and, frankly, I’m not impressed. I hate to sound like a microsmurf but .net seems to be better in many ways and with the open source implementations of the framework out there being supported, well, I might just drop PHP for good.
Somebody PLEASE tell my why I should continue down the PHP path. If there is a really good reason, then developing a good cart sounds like a great project to be working on.
i have been using OSCommerce for little time. It needs lots of improvement. Specially templates, Admin User access levels, images. Their new version 3.0 is claimed to satisfy the part 2 n 3 but templating system is still missing…
Have been using CRE loaded for a couple of years now and beta test for them as well. I have made several modifications to the software plus a couple of addons of my own one of which is in the latest release.
CRE loaded is a good choice and is feature rich with more coming every day. Not perfect mind you but considering the cost vs. the other options out like Miva or hosted carts like monstercommerce it is an great deal and with some time and a little coding you can customize it for almost any application.
Highly recommend it..
Like many of you, we were frustrated with many aspects of OsCommerce. We created a new open source shopping cart/ecommerce framework written in python (using django). So far, we have made some really good progress and I believe improve on oscommerce in many ways. Check it out at www.satchmoproject.com