Ecommerce Software Review: Zen-Cart, Shopify & nopCommerce

READ MY NEW UPDATED REVIEW OF SHOPPING CART PLATFORMS INCLUDING BIGCOMMERCE BY CLICKING THE LINK!!!!

Below is my video review of three major ecommerce software platforms: ZenCart, nopCommerce, and Shopify. I discuss the pros and cons of each and my experiences using them.

nopCommerce
  • http://www.nopcommerce.com
  • free open-source ($50 to remove powered by link)
  • asp.net (i’m better with .net than php)
  • Really great features (one page checkout,  affiliate system, easy discounts)
  • pretty new and not widely adopted yet
Zencart:
  • digital-auto-gauges.com
  • Unfortunately it has not had new versions released in a while… not great support
  • widely adopted- lots of devs who know how to work on it makes it cheaper
  • highly customizeable, but difficult to work with
  • zen-cart.com

If you are a newbie to programming or ecommerce, I recommend Shopify because it is so simple and optimized out of the box for getting leads through SEO and then converting them via a simple checkout process.  If you are a developer and have some ecommerce experience, than you would be happier with nopCommerce or Zen-cart since they are free and extremely customizable.

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments section and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Published by

Joel Gross

Joel Gross is the CEO of Coalition Technologies.

4 thoughts on “Ecommerce Software Review: Zen-Cart, Shopify & nopCommerce”

  1. Hi, nice blog and video. It was three nice ecommorce systems to review and I agreed with alot of your observations. As a web company we specialise in zencart, it’s an ecommerce solution that we’ve all been using for a number of years. I’m interested in your comments about it not being ‘very seo’ – what do you personnaly mean by that?

    If it’s, seo – the search engines won’t like it, then that’s certainly not the case as we host over 500 zencart stores and a number if these companies are doing very well on search results. However, if you mean that the standard zencart (out of the box) needs some improvement to make it more usable then we are in total agreement. Luckily there are some great mods such as fast’n’easy checkout which certainly help.

    Looking forwards to you comments.

    Regards

    jamie @ Jsweb.co.uk
    We, Ear, Drink and Live ZenCart

  2. Nice post.

    Systems are quite different to each other, all strong performers.

    Jon Hos
    eCommmerce Platform selection consultant.

  3. Hi, Joel

    I am Cynthia, and from the TomatoCart team.
    Thank you for the great in-depth reviews on the three eCommerce platforms.
    Would you like to start a topic about TomatoCart? It is PHP+MySQL based totally open source based shopping cart eCommerce, offering various payment gateways and shipping methods as in Shopify you mentioned. The gallop-ing development makes TomatoCart grow with the each passing day. The back end is the unparalleled on the marketplace till now, that implements with AJAX and Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Framework ExtJS, offering significant usability improvements and user experience…

    Maybe TomatoCart is another topic you might start.

    Best Regards,
    Cynthia
    cynthia.li@elootec.com

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