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Shopping carts - the saga grows ever longer
The trials and tribulations we’re having at work with shopping cart software continues to be a pain in the arse. Every time you think you’ve found a solution and that yes, this is the one we’re going to use, something comes along and blows a hole right through your plans.
As I’ve written in previous posts, we’d been looking mainly at Zen Cart which seemed to have all the functionality but had a back-end so horrible that it almost made your eyes bleed. Coupled with this is the fact that a lot of what should be simple settings (like changing the date format) require major hacking around in PHP files. This is not the best solution for an application that is to be used in a commercial environment; time should be spent in more productive areas. But this is what was available to us and so we were (painfully) slowly beginning to get a handle on it and get it set up.
Then whilst browsing a tech support forum a colleague came across a reference to CS Cart; not one we’d heard of before, but they had an online demo that you could check out. Still open source (although not free) CS Cart is so much more user-friendly than Zen Cart. Changing the date format is the click of one option button, the layout is good, everything is sensibly arranged. Downloaded a trial version, loaded it up and within about three hours had got further than we did with Zen Cart in about 24. But then, just as we were thinking that we’d got it all sorted (and were starting to chat up the big boss for the $195 asking price) we discovered that it couldn’t manage VAT in the way that we needed it to.
VAT (sales tax) is a painful subject for shopping cart software, and a lot of them don’t seem able to get a handle on it. Based in the UK, we have to include VAT (which runs at 17.5%) in all of our prices for UK and EC deliveries, but not for deliveries outside the EC. Further, at the checkout we need to be able to show the VAT element of the total price. But while browsing the cart, UK consumers expect to see the full price, not the price without VAT and this is the bit that CS Cart can’t seem to get a handle on. If you set it to display prices with VAT then VAT gets charged for ALL deliveries, no matter where they are going. If you set it so that it shows the correct prices for deliveries outside the EC, then UK and EC consumers will see the pre-VAT price in big letters and the post-VAT price much smaller - until they actually checkout. No combination of settings seemed to rectify the situation.
I then read somewhere that CS Cart was based on X Cart, so I went to see if they had a demo version. Not only do they, but it comes ready set up for UK VAT and does everything absolutely as we’d want it to. But, it’s more expensive and there’s quite a bit of functionality, standard in CS Cart, that is an add-on extra - at quite a bit more money. Considering there’s no budget for this project and we were trying to do it with only free software, we’re now left in a bit of tricky situation - go for the cheaper option which has more functionality but can’t do the VAT 100% properly, or lose some of the functionality in return for being able to do the VAT the way it should be done?
If there’s anyone out there who has any experience using CS Cart or X Cart, I’d appreciate knowing what your opinion is. Is one better than the other, and if so, why? Is X Cart worth the extra money, or do you know a way to get CS Cart to do the VAT?
Comments
2 Responses to “Shopping carts - the saga grows ever longer”
I think you know what to do....
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
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You might want to look at Cube Cart, which is a product *from* the UK, so presumably they’ll handle your taxes properly. Also open source but not GPL (i.e. sold as a commercial product).
Good luck,
Software Guy
@That Software Guy:
Thanks for the tip, but we’ve already looked at that and whilst it’s better than Zen Cart from a user-friendliness point of view it still lacks the functionality. And I’m not sure that it did do the VAT properly.