opinion on shopping carts
1.Os commerce
Good scalability, tough to customize, big drawback is that i don't know of any os commmerce or zencart that stands out in design. Basically they all look similar/the same. If i am doing a custom solution for a client i want my creation to be original/stand out
Ease of Use/Management is ok but only for basic functions
SEO friendliness, not sure there
Overall: Unless you like a "cookie-cutter" look not recommended
2.Miva
Poor scalability, limited customization, propitiatory miva script tough to master. Database hard to manage if not impossible
Stability and security are both questionable. Unless you have a host that is totally geared to serving miva, it will be veeery slow especially with large amount of traffic.
Hard to manage orders, products. Checkout is confusing for users.
SEO is terrible, Google will index but forget about Yahoo, MSN unless you create good static pages
3.Ablecommerce (my pick)
Stable, scalable environment, choice of cfm, asp.net. You can take it anywhere you want and customization is limitless.
It uses ms-SQL and MySQL which is very convenient/super fast/stable.
If you have a good ISP running good Windows servers it will be very fast, you don’t have to worry about traffic, etc.
Very SEO friendly, no limits there, msn especially will love anything with asp.net.
Over all my favorite pick due to customization options, stability, and use of common asp.net, cfm environment
Support here is expensive and a bit hard to reach but they have an extensive library of self –help tools, great manuals and support groups. I wish they would not charge for additional 2k for the dll source code .
4.Storefront.net
Storefront also uses asp.net, its easy to setup a basic store and very fast. It can even be customized in dream weaver or Front Page as the solution has plug ins for both. Problems come with how the code is written , basically not commented, confusing structure and hard to customize unless you are really good in asp.net. Its definitely scalable they will even supply you with visual studio .net project files which is nice.
Their support is flawless, very knowledgeable and support forum as awesome.
There are also lots of third party plug-in support companies. One of my favorites is sfaddons.com
5.bvcommerce
co comment here, not familiar enough
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