OpenCart – 2 Thumbs Up..Way Up!

The winter has been a long one around our house and it seem like the hunt for signs of Spring are starting earlier each year. This year as the weather outside got worse Kay and I started talking about how we should spend more time away from these computers and outside doing things together. Now Kay loves the flea markets and odd little shops that carry almost everything you would never need. I hate them. But over these last few weeks I think we came upon a compromise that I can live with and that is building an online shop to sell these treasures that we discover on our outings this Spring and Summer.

Now the fact is that I enjoy building websites and so this endeavor sound like a great opportunity to give me another site in which to fiddle while also getting out of the house more to do something Kay enjoys. Great but what about the site? I’ll need a shopping cart and store in which to feature all these treasures we find.

I spent a few weeks looking around to see just what was available and what would fit for the idea I have for the website. I looked at some of the most notable ones like Zencart, AgoraCart osCommerce, and PrestaShop just to name a few and while each of them have some great points and all are free to some extent they just didn’t float my boat. In other words I just could not get excited about using them.

Then I happened to find OpenCart. This shopping cart appears to me to be the Rolls Royce of shopping carts especially for the small to medium size business. Why? Well for one reason it is a very sharp looking system. Whoever has created this cart knew what the hell they were doing. OpenCart is not the boring, bulky looking cart that you find on many sites, no sir, this baby has some eye ball to it. And uploading it to your server and installing OpenCart is a breeze.

Like any piece of software or script there are things that you will need to figure out and I have already had to ask a question on the OpenCart community board. Here again OpenCart exceeded my expectation. Within minutes of posting my question I had an answer from a poster named “imaginetech” . Not only did I have an answer but it was clear, concise and to the point and correct. I don’t know if this imaginetech is the creator of this shopping cart or just one of the users of this cart there to help the newbie but it was very impressive.

So how much is this OpenCart going to cost you as a webmaster or site owner? Nota, nothing, zip, it is open source which means it’s FREE! Yup, Opencart is free to use although like many coders who spend a huge amount of time on projects like OpenCart they do accept (and rightfully so) donations.

Spring is still a few months away and so is our “treasure hunting” at the flea markets my new site is now under construction using OpenCart as the foundation.

Need your own shopping cart? You better included OpenCart in your selection process. You can visit the OpenCart website here

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