To elaborate on that, yes, OpenCart is open source software and free to use, but the options that come with it leave a little to be desired. If you want to actually upgrade your cart to, you know, look and do some of the things that other shopping cart solutions do, then you gotta pay a third party developer for an extension (or modification).

They do have quite a large group of people who develop all kinds of wonderful extensions that make the cart better, and to give them credit there are some very useful free 3rd party extensions available, but for the more serious extensions you usually have to pay someone for it. Also, you are responsible for searching through all the extensions, downloading them, uploading them to your site, making sure they work, figuring out why if they don’t, etc. etc. It takes a lot of time, and there’s no guarantee that one extension won’t break another extension (or your cart) and so on.

While it might seem like you are getting a good deal, you usually end up paying for extra themes (OpenCart only comes with 1 default theme), extensions, modifications, etc. I ended up spending close to $200 on my cart (and I wasn’t even finished with it yet) before I started to realize “At this rate i’m gonna end up paying more for this free cart than I would if I used a paid shopping cart service that already offers all these things built in!”

Bottom line, I really do like OpenCart. I think out of all the free open source shopping carts, it is probably the best. It is easy to use out of the box, easy to navigate the admin panel, and it has a good community behind it. However, if you are the type of person who only wants to focus on the sale and marketing of your products and leave all the technical aspects to someone else, then you should either go with a paid shopping cart solution, or hire a web developer who can deal with OpenCart for you.

What are these misunderstandings you speak of anyway? Perhaps you should forward your concerns to the mods author so they can improve it.

There is an add-on module but it’s not integrated into the normal payment system due to the author’s misunderstanding of Google’ terms and conditions and how Opencart works.

Anyway, if you can cope with ‘wasting’ one week to develop one theme, Opencart is a great solution.

OC does have users! thousands of them and a lot that are dedicated to the project development. The developers listen to the users in the forum and really try and make it better with each release. I dont think I will ever use anything else other than OC…just love it.

There’s got to be something wrong, it can’t just be this easy

So far opencart does everything I need without any fuss or bother and it’s not US centric, a UK shop by default saves about 3 hours hacking

I did get excited about magento and then tried to implement an actual shop, oh my, no wonder most magento shops are based on the default theme and try explaining a how to alter stuff to a client who doesn’t know the difference between google and the Internet

Thank you opencart… The saviour of opensource shopping carts

Fine isnt brilliant…..I think it can be improved and it will be. It should actually give you more control and be a bit easier so no worries. Plus you can always still use v1.3.2 if its more comfortable.

I agree Magento is weird. I had a quick look at it and got depressed very quickly. Perhaps I will have a more indepth look when I have the time and patience. Right now Im an Opencart lover and will push it as much as I can!