Shopping Carts

if your using barclays merchant why ar eyou using romanpay instead of ePDQ ?
loads of open source carts there is another post on here with a load mentioned. if your using epdq make sure the cart will work with it or email me as we specialise in epdq integration
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we use mainly cactushop for ourselves if its cheap for a client oscommerce or our own cart

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Is there not merit in selecting just one e-commerce system for yourself and your clients. That way you are recommending to your clients what you use yourself. You will have at least one sample site (your site) for your potential clients to look at. It is easier being an expert in one e-commerce system rather than two. An ecommerce system that meets both your requirements and your potential client's requirements is more likely to be flexible enough to meet other unforeseen requirements of other potential customers. I'm a big fan of trying to find a solution that solves many problems.
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder

Why not just buy the developer edition of erol? Then each time you create a cart for a client you have the software there and then?

I dont think that RomanCart is really free, if you want to accept card payments then it costs £40 per year to hook it up to a payment gateway. If you are looking for truly free solutions, move your focus away from commercial packages and their 'deals', and look at some open source systems like oscommerce.
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder

I agree that the basic oscommerce system looks cheap, but you shouldn't really be using the basic default oscommerce system. Oscommerce requires customisation in order to look professsional. If you look at the example live sites at www.oscommerce.com there will be cheap looking ones and professional looking ones, the professional ones will be customised versions of oscommerce.

Oscommerce customisation is achieved through a combination of changing CSS code, changing PHP program code, installing open source PHP modules and maybe templates (which may also contain PHP) - so it's not for the faint of heart! If you are using a paid for template as your default system then you wont be able to pass this on to customers for free, so it is best to avoid these in setting up your professional oscommerce system.

In the past my company's clients have only required very simple shopping carts for a few products, and these requirements have been met with the paypal's free tools (shopping cart, payment). We have recently taken on clients that require more advanced e-commerce systems, hence our oscommerce focus. Like you, we are trying to come up with the best value generic solution that many of our clients can use, we are aiming to provide a value for money client-customisable managed solution rather than undertake a more expensive custom bespoke project for each client, hence our open source focus to keep client costs down.

If you are not keen on the basic oscommerce system and dont want to get your hands dirty so much customising it to make it professional, you could also consider Zen Cart or CRE Loaded, which are ready customised derivatives of oscommerce and are still open source.

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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder

I can highly recommend Romancart, Im running with it on two sites. The support on their forums is excellent, with responses from their staff within hours. I even asked for fairly major change to be made specifically for my own benefit on the payment processor pages, and it was implemented within about 2 hours! I have never had sevice that good from another company.
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http://www.atomi.co.uk">href="http://www.atomi.co.uk">http://www.atomi.co.uk

I only use Romancart on my own sites. I have not used Romanpay as I use Nochex on my sites as the payment processor since you don't need to have a merchant account with a high street bank.

I have moved my sites to Romanhost as well now, and thats just as professional and very good value for money. I see no reason that the Romanpay service would be just usable as the other Roman services.

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http://www.atomi.co.uk">href="http://www.atomi.co.uk">http://www.atomi.co.uk

Your site looks very nice atomi. Could you please clarify what part of your overall online shop is RomanCart and what part is external to RomanCart. For instance is RomanCart used to store your product categories, products, product descriptions and images, does RomanCart power the product search, and provide the overall shop browsing interface? Or is some other software managing all this?

The reason I ask is that I think there may be confusion (in this thread and generally) over what is a shopping cart and what is an online shop. My understanding is that shopping carts like PayPal and RomanCart handle the basket (and payment side) of an e-commerce site, whilst online shop/ecommerce solutions (like Erol, Actinic, oscommerce) handle the product content and web presentation of the overall shop and the shopping basket.

I've had a quick look at RomanCart and I think it offers a great alternative to the PayPal shopping basket, and like PayPal it even allows HTML only sites to sell products, without necessarily being tied in to PayPal as the payment provider.
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder

The part that Romancart handles on my site is from the point you click "Buy Now" for any product, if you try this you will see that the address URL changes from my site address to romancart.com when you are then viewing the basket.

The site itself is running a custom backend written by me with the product description, prices, and all asociated details in that database. My code dynamically generates the forms that need to be submitted to Romancart to purchase the products. The search etc is all written by me, I use Romancart purely for the basket and payment processor interfacing.

However, if you choose then Romancart has something called remote delivery whereby you enter all your products and quantities in the romancart admin and it can display the prices, stock availability etc on your site. You are correct in assuming that Romancart is compariable to the Paypal basket, its not a fully intergrated turnkey solution for someone looking for a full website, you must design the actual site yourself.

Hope this helps.
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http://www.atomi.co.uk">href="http://www.atomi.co.uk">http://www.atomi.co.uk

Thanks for the clarification atomi. Credit where credit is due. We certainly don't want anyone to get the wrong impression by thinking that RomanCart takes all the credit for your site, when in fact the majority of your site is down to your own effort and design, development and implementation skills.
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Paul - www.awebapart.com - 'a web apart'
create, update your website today - the online professional site builder