Introducing CS-Cart

For a long time, the shopping cart industry has been dominated by carts that have been around for years. Zen Cart, osCommerce, X-Cart and the like have had huge market share since the early days of e-commerce.

While CS-Cart lacks the popularity of these old solutions, it had the luxury of learning from their mistakes. With a more mature second version now available, it’s a serious contender for anyone in the market for a cheap, flexible shopping cart.

Key Features

CS-Cart is designed for easy deployment – in our tests, setup and install was a breeze. Initial configuration was mainly straight forward, although a few settings were tricky to find. But of course you only need to do this once.

A one-page checkout, tasteful use of AJAX, and sophisticated built-in features such as a targeted newsletter system puts CS-Cart a cut above the average cart. While you can find these features in competitive products, they usually involve installing modules, fiddly configuration, and visits to support forums. CS-Cart’s integrated solution saves hours of work, especially for non-programmers, allowing you to focus on your business rather than the technology.

Customization mode makes it easy to edit template files. (Click for larger image).

Customizing for Your Shop

CS-Cart offers plenty of customization features to ensure it will meet the need of your shop. Basics such as tax and shipping are covered well. More impressive is the product configuration which includes sophisticated features such as creating product variations, quantity discounts, and creating bundles to sell multiple products in a package.

Creating Your Look

CS-Cart comes with a selection of professional, although somewhat conservative, skins. Changing the page layout -- for example, adding a best sellers list -- is easy and needs no programming skills. It’s just drag and drop.

Editing the skins is a pleasure for anyone with basic HTML, CSS and PHP skills. Many competitive products force you to hunt to find the right file to edit. CS-Cart simplifies this with its “Customization mode” that lets you find the right template visually, and edit it immediately.

Looking Deeper

There are a few strange default features, such as a CAPTCHA, in the checkout. While you can turn off the feature, the less experienced shop owner is likely to leave it on and have sales suffer as a result.

On the other hand, there are areas in which the product is very sophisticated. For example, when a product appears in multiple categories the breadcrumb shows the correct category, but has the same URL in all cases, which avoids SEO duplicate content issues – a Google killer common to many carts.

Thoughtful touches like the “Add to Cart” button being AJAX-enabled makes the customer experience smoother.

Conclusion

CS-Cart customers are almost universally passionate about the product, which speaks volumes about the quality of the software. Problems can be dealt with quickly via a comprehensive knowledge base, a helpful and active user forum and paid support. A growing partner network is available for more complex customizations.

It’s certain that in coming years this increasingly popular product will grow to be a dominant player in the shopping cart industry.

Mark Baartse is founder of Shopping-Cart-Reviews.com , the leading shopping cart information site. He lives in Sydney, Australia where he works on e-commerce sites, helping to maximize their profitability. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/markbaa.