open cart pros and cons

OpenCart Pros and Cons

First, I would like to tell that my first personal ecommerce site is in Open Cart around 3 years back. And now I create all my ecommerce websites in Magento. The main reason is Magento is very heavy system. It offers many features as compared to any other ecommerce platform. But I was looking for an average featured website with not many functionality and light version of stable ecommerce platform.

So I started to look for a new ecommerce system. After few days of reading blogs, forums, sites and reviews I stopped at the Open-Cart. I have never regretted it.

Advantages of the Open Cart

  1. It is open source
  2. It is actively developed
  3. It has a huge community
  4. It has a lot of modules and themes (about 10 000) – free and commercial
  5. Cheap commercial modules not like in Magento
  6. It has a good shop functionality
  7. It is very fast. Shop with 20 or 30 thousand of products can work on the cheap shared hosting
  8. Object Oriented Programming
  9. MVC Architecture
  10. It has a very simple code. My first Open Cart module I’ve created after 3 day working with it. For example it took me about 3 months for create my first module on Magento

Disadvantages of the Open Cart

  1. One of the biggest disadvantages of the Open Cart is that it hasn’t good hook system like in the Magento or Event system like in the Symfony. Events has just appeared in OpenCart 2.0 and they are at the early stage of development. Without it you can do nothing programmatically from your module. You can’t even add new menu item without editing the Open Cart core code. You can do it manually or use vQmod for it. vQmod is a very bad solution because it changes the core files using string functions and causes a lot of conflicts.
  2. As Open Cart has very simple and easy code it attracts many beginner developers. These developers create Open Cart themes and extensions and sell it. You can purchase a new module and get very bad one with a terrible and not secure code inside.

Conclusion

Open Cart is an interesting alternative for Magento. It’s a very good script for beginners and intermediate programmers/shop owners. It works fine with almost any number of products. It requires very less server resources then Magento. Matching the number of Open Cart functionalities to Magento could mean getting a poorer efficiency. Good tech support and a large number of free add-ons make for good cart’s development opportunities, as well as a good start for you business.