Realex and shopping carts..

doberden

Registered User
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414
Hi, I'm implementing payment processing through my website and using realex. They have plugins available for the following shopping carts, can anyone recommend any of them:

Zen Cart
Clickcartpro
cactusshop
actinic
RomanCartezimerchant Professional
Class Calender
ProVendorOSCommerceJShopWandSoftEKMX-Authorize
 
Realex should be able to take payment from any shopping cart website, is that not the case?

Zen Cart is very popular and so is OS commerce. I use CubeCart on one of my sites and it works very well.
 
they list out the ones they have worked with before so they are their preferred list. I'm sure they would consider additional ones.
 
yes you can integrate realex with anything you want, but the complexity can depend on the cart.

as you say doberden, the advantage of the ones you list is that realex have plugin scripts that make integration very easy. although, if you want things to work a bit different than usual (e.g. less screens in the checkout process etc), it would of course still involved some customisation.

as for which cart to go for, it really depends on your needs doberden. how many different types of product will you be selling, how complicated will your shipping costs be, how much detail will you need to enter for each product (e.g. just a name, image and price or will there be size, colour, finish variations etc)....

also, are you constrained by your hosting package? of the names on your list, i only have direct experience of oscommerce, but i have taken a quick look at a few of the others in the past and afaik some of those ones are PHP/Linux based and others are Windows/ASP based.

oscommerce is very popular, and a lot of web hosts offer an easy install for it. there are all sorts of plugins available for it and it's free. however, i'm not that keen on it myself. it is quite bloated, and the admin area is not that intuitive. i don't do many shops, so i can't recommend any particular software i'm afraid, as i have usually coded custom solutions.

many shopping cart sites have an online demo available. your best bet is to try a few out. think of the things that you want to be able to do easily (add products, set up your shipping etc) and try them out. also, drop by their support forums if possible and gauge how active/content/helpful current users seem.
 
I am using Actinic for my site at the moment. Developing another site to go live in october & have chosen to stick with Actinic.

A few reasons are:
1) It's not entirely web based - it's software which installs on your PC & allows you to add/edit change etc & then upload the site/changes when you're happy with it.

2) Because of the above backups are dead easy. Just save a backup & should anything go wrong with the online site, simply republish.

3) Payment gateways etc. are dead easy to setup. & there's a pretty good reference manual anyway.

4) It's intuitive enough for me, & i don't have to go messing with open-source stuff. Not that i'm against open source, it's just that in this case when my business image is at stake i want something commercial which i can get support on quickly enough.

The only issue is site customisation. If you don't have much web experience or don't have the time etc. then you may have to get someone to customise a design template for you. But this is generally a once-off.
 
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