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Standards-Compliant Shopping Cart with XHTML & CSS!

I’ve been looking for a shopping cart like this for a long time

One of my clients is looking to move from osCommerce to a more user-friendly solution, and I really want to use a shopping cart that is XHTML and standards-compliant…Something that validates and looks pretty with stylesheets off, has a full feature set, and a great admin panel.

I was quite pleasantly surprised when I discovered Tradingeye. They have a well-coded shopping cart solution as well as a CMS. Very, very interesting.  Looks like a pleasure to develop for; like WordPress for eCommerce. Check out their Shopping cart demo.

…and now, may I say something about eCommerce carts?

I spent yesterday searching for standards-compliant shopping carts that actually looked DIFFERENT when turning off style sheets.  That had good code.  But boy, the scene is pretty dismal out there.

Anyone know a good standards-compliant cart out there?

I know about Shopify (which is great, but a closed system)…what other great shopping carts are out there?

By Zack Katz

Zack Katz is the founder of GravityKit and TrustedLogin. He lives in Leverett, Massachusetts with his wife Juniper.

13 replies on “Standards-Compliant Shopping Cart with XHTML & CSS!”

We implemented Magento for a client site a few months ago. Not fun. I had high hopes for Magento but it’s a major pain to template anything but a 2- or 3-column layout (like their demo). And, it’s a bit of a resource/memory hog (server-side).

I know, I’ve been looking for the longest time for a non-spaghetti cart as well. I use one at work that doesn’t even have any HTML when you start. You create the templates from scratch, and there are absolutely no limitations. It even has front-end editability so when you call a product or page description or custom attribute it’s like $group.getDescriptionEditable() and when you’re logged in on the site you just hit CTRL + SHIFT + V and it turns yellow and lets you edit it, but when you’re not logged in, it just outputs your normal HTML. It runs on about 1.5 million dollars of hardware and uses Amazon S3 for server off-loading, and it never crashes. It’s the shit. The caveat is this: It costs upwards of $80 a month. So, I’ve spent the last 8 months of my life looking for a good easy-to-customize cart that offers all the big options like UPS quotes, and PayPal website payments pro. Trading Eye doesn’t offer these. MagentoCommerce does, and it’s free too. The problem is this: it runs on the PHP Zend Framework and it’s slow. It takes about twice the time to load a page as Trading Eye, and it’s hard to customize cause the template calls are done with XML instead of the handy !–Begin– syntax that Trading Eye offers, but it has 50 times the features. I’m really stumped. I’ve been thinking of creating my own cart. Just thought I’d vent, let me know what you think.

I completely agree w/the post, I have been so disappointed by all the shopping carts I’ve tried out so far, particularly in terms of CSS layout and ease of use. I’ll be checking these out.

Guys, I’ve been working with Tradingeye for over 2 years now, its just an amazing product in the market. Once you get to know more about the product you could then customise it easily.

Anyway, I also would recommend you to try Prestashop (open source e-commerce). It uses “smarty template” which is similar to Tradingeye template and separate HTML from PHP;

The search for the perfect shopping cart seems like a pipe dream, but for now I’ll have to settle for the closest one.
Now that it’s 2010, does anyone have any other recommendations?

I’m starting a new project and looking for a cart, so far the ones on my “short” list are:
 
zen cart
OS Commerce / OSC max
x-cart (paid)
cubecart
magento
opencart
prestashop
Early thoughts are that I like opencart and prestashop – lovely interfaces… any other thoughts or recommendations?
 

Maybe i’m late,
I’m using PrestaShop an ISC to ecommerce websites… I’ve tried Magento but i think it have some problems in translations and is too big… The module creation is no so easy like the other ones…
Mozack

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