If you just want to compare the carts on what they will cost you per year check out my Shopping Cart Pricing Comparison. Welcome to 2012 and an updated list of to the point bite sized shopping cart reviews to help you filter out the best shopping carts from the nonsense. If it saves you time, leave a comment if you hate it leave two.
Hosted Shopping Cart Software
1ShoppingCart – Solid product, great support. Great if you are in a competitive industry and really need to make sales. Full of marketing tools and add-ons to help you squeeze every sale out of your visitors. Take it for a test drive you wont regret it. 1ShoppingCart Review coming in late October 2012
BigCommerce – Full featured. Safe bet, support is questionable luckily you will probably never need it. You could go straight to BigCommerce and never regret it. Read a full BigCommerce Review
Shopify – Looks good. Costs more than it should and every new feature costs a little bit more, but it looks great and is very easy to use. Start here and move to BigCommerce if it doesn’t fit. Read a full Shopify Review
CoreCommerce – cheaper than BigCommerce almost identical otherwise. You will be happy with CoreCommerce if you choose it, they are always improving it. Read a full CoreCommerce Review
AShop - Great features, only pay for what you use pricing structure to keep costs down, lots of beautiful free themes and great support. Also includes an Australian version that is ideal for Australian ecommerce stores. Read my Ashop Commerce Review
Fortune3 – it’s getting there. Expect a few bugs if you jump on board now. Otherwise wait unti the end of 2012 it should be ready for the big to time then.
Pinnacle Cart – Very easy to use. Has more than enough features. Has the best marketing and re-marketing tools of any cart available. Read a full Pinnacle Cart Review
IzzoNet – IzzoNet is a viable alternative to BigCommerce – especially if you are looking for unlimited bandwidth. Solid cart that does multi-language and is full of features. Worth a look, expect an IzzoNet Review in early March
3dCart – 3dCart is a great cart, I wish more people would consider it. It looks good. Runs great and the people behind are awesome. Read a full 3dCart Review
BigCartel – Worth a look. Ideal for setting up your indie T-shirt or music website. Super software done right. Not very good for shops dealing in volume or large traffic. Read a full BigCartel Review
Americommerce – Great. Has every feature yo could ever want built right into it. Takes a little learning because of it’s size but it works and support is excellent. Read a full Americommerce Review
Volusion – if you have to use it it is fine, it should never be your first choice. Very difficult to learn, expensive to make it look good.
Magento Go – worse than Magento – more restrictive, no ready way to move to another provider when you realise how bad it really is and you can’t access the code to make the necessary changes to make the shop actually run and generate sales.
Highwire – A commendable effort. Priced appropriately. Worse shopping carts out there. I like what I have seen so far.
Vendio – not impressed. Too expensive for the little love it will give you. They need to bring there pricing down to comparable carts like Highwire and BigCartel.
Licensed Shopping Cart Software
Cube Cart – No, don’t bother. Try CS Cart or Interspire. The have tried to do too much and you are left feeling like they didn’t do any of it well.
CS Cart – Always happy to use and work with CS Cart. It just goes about it’s business quietly. Give it a shake you won’t be sorry.
Interspire – Brilliant but it has a questionable future, I wouldn’t be relying on it. If you have some developers handy it is worth a look but Interspire became BigCommerce and they have basically left Interspire and all the customers standing outside in the rain. the software is good but it probably won’t get new features or support past 2012.
Lemonstand – Has everything in place to be a real contender. Runs slow on most web servers and the documentation is poor. Give it 2 more releases and it will shine. Definitely keep an eye on it or adopt it now and be brave.
Magento – more difficult than brain surgery, Uglier than a bag of smashed crabs. Do not use. Never. You have been warned.
KonaKart – If you need a Java Shopping Cart go with KonaKart. It does everything you could want. Pricing model is a bit weird. Free or $5,000 but the software is solid.
X-Cart - does this even still exist? Lets hope not. It did a great job back in the day before we knew how to properly design shopping cart software and seperate business and presentation logic. Pass. The support is non-existant anyway if you bought a copy you would be on your own.
ASP(.NET) Shopping Carts
AspDotNetStorefront – a monster of a product. Lots of nice features but you will pay for them. If you have the cash go for it it is leading the way
Free Shopping Carts
OpenCart – once you get it set up Open cart rocks and the price is right. A few very minor hidden costs for some features but gaining momentum, shold be the premier open source shopping cart in 2 years.
Prestashop – Not as good as OpenCart but a close second. Has a strong community so it will continue to improve and grow. If you chose to use it you would be in safe hands.
osCommerce – Have you seen old screenshots of Internet Explorer 4 – remember when it came out and it was cool but now you look at it and laugh and remember the good old days and Melrose Place and what not. osCommerce is the Internet Explorer 3 of shopping carts. Technically it might still work but it will be the worst online experience of your life. Please think of the children, don’t even visit the site it just encourages them.
ZenCart – ZenCart is worse than osCommerce. ZenCart is like osCommerce but with crazy clown paint on. I can’t explain why but every ZenCart website looks like it was built by a colour blind alpaca. It isn’t the designer’s fault – there is just something that happens when ZenCart renders a webpage that makes jesus cry and customers flee screaming.
WordPress Shopping Carts
WP e-commerce – your best best. Go for the $40 option ans get all the bells and whistle’s. Strong developer community so you can always get help.
Shopp – It’ll do, I don’t much fancy it but it isn’t the worst thing you will ever do.
Jigoshop – Run. If your developer suggests this sack them and then beat them. They sack them again so they get the point.
Drupal Shopping Carts
Ubercart – If you have to use Drupal and you have to integrate a shopping cart this is the best option. It is still like doing dental work on yourself though.
Joomla Shopping Carts
VirtueMart – The only joomla shopping cart worth thinking about. You need to question why you are using Joomla in the first place. Like wordpress carts you should move the store onto a subdomain and use dedictaed shopping cart software.
Hikashop – They tried to make a very simple flexible shopping cart. They did. Then they added “marketing tools” and now it is junk. Don’t even download it and take a look you will abuse me for making you waste your time.