shopping cart

Seems a bit strange there are no transaction fees, if you are excepting credit cards then someone has to pay the charges and I'm sure if they are charged to the users they would soon see you in court.

The FAQ page says:
Do you charge fees per transaction?
No, there are no transaction fees or any other hidden fees when you use NextAge Cart.

They could be telling the truth, as they arent the ones charging you the fee, but the bank or whoever excepts the credit card transactions surely will charge you a fee and if they do then this is a hidden fee.

On the about us page they say they service 1000's of sites, yet there are no examples of any (not that I could find).

The more I read in this site the more I'd keep away, they like to talk themselves up "industry leader", "award-winning application"

If you go to the purchase price, to buy the "Licensed Application" it's only $149, yet when you click on "Product/Pricing Details" under it, the price is $199 for new customers only taken down from $549.99 (yeah right).
Go to http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/49387.html or http://www.scriptsearch.com/details/1800.html and you can buy it for $14.99 (yes fourteen dollars)

http://www.i-totalsecurity.net/secalert4.php lists a security vulnerability for this cart

I've used osCommerce on clients' sites as well. Sometimes the payment method module doesn't work without some tweaking, but aside from that I've been happy.

If you'd like to see any of them, here are the sites I've used osCommerce on:
http://www.azteccreations.net/
http://www.ellaelaine.com/
http://www.megguess.com/

navalan wrote: I'm also thinking about dotnetnuke tools

But then you'll be tied into using Microsoft web servers?! That would be silly, especially if you need to use some Open Source shopping cart like OSCommerce. Some other things about DotNetNuke I've found (these are just my opinion, please correct me if wrong! ):

1. It's not Web Standards Compliant
2. It's not as well-known or supported as many other Open Source CMS
3. If you lock yourself into Windows web hosts you'll also lock-down your choice. Most other CMS rely on PHP and MySQL, which are designed to run on Linux.
4. There aren't as many plugins/extensions for this CMS as others.
5. If you wanted to integrate other Open Source products (e.g. a Forum integrated with a CMS) you'll probably find a lack of choice due to the platform you're using.

Dissenters will point out that you can use PHP and MySQL on a windows platform. Why would you do this unless you absolutely had to? Aside from that, DotNetNuke is not as good as something like Drupal, which has very good community support, and lots of plugins. It's also Web Standards compliant.

If you're setting up e-commerce sites for small businesses, you'll need to be using something like OSCommerce (currently the most popular choice), it's Free/Open Source and requires PHP and MySQL. There are other choices available, such as Zencart

With regard to the original question: I would seriously consider what your choice has that other Open Source purveyors of fine solutions don't. I had a quick look around, and considering they charge for their product, I couldn't see much that would differentiate it from something like OSCommerce.

The other thing to remember is that "cool features" in your cart do not sell product, if anything they detract from the product and confuse the customer. Just had a meeting with a customer who am building an OSCommerce site for, we went through the functionality provided by default and removed about a third of it. Fluff is usually useless.

Big fan of osCommerce here too. Use it a lot in my "day job". Very capable platform that is highly customisable and well supported. Pretty well coded as well, which makes life easier in the long run.

Here's a couple we've done recently (I assume it is OK for me to post these, if not can a Mod delete them?)
findwatches.co.uk
findjewellery.co.uk
underthetop.com
telemark-pyrenees.com
nutr-ivital.co.uk
byjo.co.uk

I am in the proccess of making my oscommerce based site but havent had much time but even pritty much stock it works well and handels orders nicely.

Zen cart & osCommerce are basically 2 forks for the same development. I've produced a couple of dozen osCommerce sites and never had a security issue.

Not sure how much use the books would be. Open Source developments move pretty quickly and I'd imagine books go out of date pretty quickly. Much better to use the wiki and forums which are of course updated continually.

osCommerce can be a little daunting at first, but it isn't all that bad. Once you know what you are doing you can get one installed and configured in under 10 minutes. Getting it to do exactly what you want and look how you want does of course take longer.

My only complaint (well, criticism really) is that the code and design in osCommerce are too closely integrated. You have to do quite a lot of editing to change the look completely. There are however contributions that improve on this - although I don't use them myself.

The best PHP book is definitely php.net

What's probably worth doing is to just set up some cheap/free hosting and install a store that you can play around with to get used to it. There are plenty of people who will help (for a fee) if you get stuck. In fact.... that's my full-time job

Zencart / osCommerce uses a lot of it's own classes - which is confusing when you first start out. If you persevere it does all suddenly fall into place and make sense though.