Shopping Cart Software

Closed source

Opensource

Free

• Zen Cart. Based on osCommerce. PRO: Better than osCommerce because of a templating system that makes it fairly simple to modify the look and feel. CON: very robust — overkill for our needs.
• osCommerce. PRO: fairly small PROject, admin interface simpler to use than Zen Cart. CON: Not maintained much anymore, code isn't well written, I can't figure out how to change the look and feel.
• CRE Loaded. PRO: Better support? CON: Suffers from the same non-usability as Zen Cart and osCommerce. You have a lot of CONtrol, but the data that you modify is displayed like the result you get back from a SQL query, and you're required to do everything manually — for instance, to CONtrol in what order the sideboxes appear, you enter a number. You should just be able to drag and drop, but no! You also have to manually enter the names of files — so you have to remember what you named them in the filesystem. So you have to really know what you're doing!
• closedShop. PRO: small PROject written for a specific purpose, seems to be well done (haven't looked at the code). CON: written in Perl. Article here
• Fastilo. PRO: Nice and simple, decently designed. CON: not robust enough for our needs: can't change templates, can't show when the PROduct was released, can't add attributes to products.

Commercial

• X-Cart. PRO: Much better designed than osCommerce and derivatives, and there's actually documentation!! CON: Almost 200 clams for just the Gold edition!! Also, can't add attributes to products.

Both

• Shop-Script. The free version doesn't offer many features but they're using Smarty as a template system, so we could probably go in and modify a bunch of stuff. On the other hand, it seems that the free version doesn't have a shopping cart system, though the $179 version does.