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Review: CS-Cart Shopping Cart Software

by Pat Fortino

  • Content Creation – Creating content pages, pages other than your product pages, is easy to do with CS Cart. What’s more, it’s very easy to link these to the CS Cart menu system. And there is a function that allows you to automatically add all pages to a menu system. This is a great feature for a shopping cart since many carts are not very good at content that is not a product. Does this mean CS Cart is a full blown CMS like Joomla or WordPress? Definitely not. But it has an adequate Content Management System. If you need a full blown blog or CMS, you might need two systems: CS Cart for ecommerce, and Joomla or WordPress for your Blog and Content Management system.
  • Twigmo Mobile Front End – Twigmo is a mobile template system for displaying your shopping cart in a mobile format for smart phones like iPhone and Adroid. With so many mobile devices, you cannot ignore the potential for sales from smartphone browsers. A mobile template works like an app. It optimizes your site layout for viewing on a mobile device. Mobile front end display is a must have feature for a modern shopping cart.
  • iPhone Application For Store Admin – There is an iPhone app for the store admin. This means you can manage your store via an iPhone. I have not tested this app, but it’s exciting that CS Cart provides an iPhone app to administer your store.
  • Product Setup – If you’ve used any shopping cart, you will feel right at home with CS Cart, but they’ve made it very easy to create products. For example, in a lot of shopping carts, setting up product options, such as size or color, can be very confusing. With CS Cart, setting up options is easy and intuitive. Furthermore, you can set up options specific to one product or you can create global options that you can use with any product.
  • Product Tabs – If your products are complex or have a too much information to fit on one screen, you can use Product Tabs to add additional information like color charts, maps, video, etc. Like product options, you can create global tabs that can be used on all products or you can create product-specific tabs.
  • PCI Compliant – CS Cart is PCI compliant as long as your web server is PCI compliant. What is PCI Compliance? The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.  Basically, all ecommerce stores that take credit cards online are required to make their shopping cart website PCI compliant. Failure to do so can result in fines and losing the ability to take credit cards online. See the following URL for more details: http://www.pcicomplianceguide.org/pcifaqs.php
  • Over 50 Payment Gateways – If you want to take credit cards online, you will need a payment gateway like Authorize.net or Paypal. CS Cart provides the software to connect to over 50 different payment gateways.
  • Documentation – Good documentation is mandatory for any shopping cart. Otherwise, you have to resort to forums to find out how to do the most simple tasks. CS Cart comes with pretty good documentation. I say pretty good for the following reasons. The documentation is more than adequate for a person who wants to administer their own cart. However, if you want to customize the design or behavior of CS Cart, the documentation is barely adequate, especially if you don’t have extensive experience working with PHP, Smarty Templates, CSS, and shopping carts in general. While CS Cart is not responsible for explaining how to code in PHP, Smarty Templates, or CSS, they need to provide detailed instructions on how to work within their framework. Unfortunately, they provide only the minimum documentation for developers. If you need more information, you must ask questions on their forum or through the support desk.
  • Support – The good news is that if you buy one of the paid editions, 30 days support is included in the price. If you are developing a new cart, that should be enough to get most of your questions answered. Also, you can add more support at a reasonable price.
  • Cost / Value – CS Cart come in 4 editions: Community (Free), Professional ($345), Multi-Vendor ($985), and Ultimate ($650). The Professional Edition will be fulfill the requirements of most shop owners and at $345, it’s an excellent value. See the following url for a comparrison of the different versions: http://www.cs-cart.com/compare.html. You might find you can get by with the free Community edition. At minimum, you can install the Community edition so you can test drive the cart.

    • Bottom Line

    I highly recommend CS Cart. In fact, it’s the most exciting shopping cart software I’ve seen since I started building shopping cart websites 10 years ago. The fact that you can download the Community Edition for free makes it even better. You can try it before you buy it. You might find the free version is more than enough for your needs.

    Reader Interactions

    Comments

    1. Alex says

      > CS Cart is PCI compliant as long as your web server is PCI compliant.

      Nope, software must be compliant, too.
      Check PCI requirements.

      > X-Cart 5 seems like vaporware at this point.

      It is called X-Cart Next now.
      http://next.x-cart.com

      • Pat Fortino says

        This is great news. X-Cart is finally bringing out the new software. Regarding PCI compliance: I have two differenet clients using X-Cart without X-Payments, and both passed PCI compliance review on Hostgator shared servers. Hostgator had to make a couple adjustments to the server config and the sites passed their PCI compliance review. Neither of these sites store credit card info, but both use Authorize.net AIM to process credit cards on their site. Also, I have one client using CS-Cart and it too passed PCI compliance on Hostgator shared hosting.

    2. Oscar says

      Thanks for a review.
      Actually both carts are great. X-Cart did some rebranding and offered new opportunities. However, CS-Cart 3 also came with some upgrades.
      It was a curious thing to find out that both platforms are designed in Russia.

      • Pat Fortino says

        Some guys from x-cart, which is in Russia, created CS-Cart. It’s pretty easy to see the similarities, but cs cart is so much better due to the ease of upgrading.

        • GalinaJ says

          CS-Cart is also better because it supports multi store features and this helps it compete with such powerful free platforms as Magento and PrestaShop.

    3. June Fray says

      I’m pretty salty about cs-cart folks charging a monthly fee for the mobile version. We were thinking about switching over from the last good copy of Interspire shopping cart but even that abandoned product had mobile templates included a long time ago and pretty much all the bells and whistles cs-cart plugin developers are charging an arm and a long to add… like the “like this” feature, etc. I always get salty when software companies want to people to “rent” their software. Sometimes it makes sense but most of the time it doesn’t. We’ll stick with our current cart.

      • Pat Fortino says

        I agree. I think cs-cart should include a mobile responsive template with the default install. Instead they use an add-on that is not responsive, but a different template entirely. But since the carts I’ve done with cs-cart are under the product limit, the mobile version is free. Plus I love the ease of use of cs-cart, both for me and for client.

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