Accessible, standards-compliant shopping carts…
... are, unfortunately, a bit thin on the ground. Things seem to be changing slowly, though, and there now seem to be at least a few of them around. These include:
- SelectaCart. Has a front-end demo that looks good. Prices from £499 per site, but hosting and bespoke options also available.
- Tradingeye. Has an online shop-front demo which looks pretty good at first glance. It doesn’t seem to give you a password for the admin demo though (update 07-04-06: the kind folks at Tradingeye emailed me, and the username/password is demo/demo). £799 per site.
- Karova. Nice shiny website. £495 per site. Looks very promising indeed, but difficult to see what features are available. No online demo. Was used to power the Disney Store UK before they inexplicably decided to go back to a tag soup version.
- freeCSScart. Invite-only beta at the moment (yawn!), with obligatory Web2.0 styling and star badges, but looks promising. We can infer, however, that it (a) uses CSS, and (b) is free. It claims that it will be fully standards compliant, which I’m hoping will mean fully accessible as well. Will it get bought out by one of the big boys before it sees the light of day, though?
I have to admit that I haven’t used any of these packages in anger (or in a state of inner tranquility for that matter), nor have I looked in any depth at how true their claims of accessibility are. While there aren’t really a lot of options to choose from, they all look potentially better bets than the sordid, nested-table-osity of the e-commerce solutions currently listed on opensourceCMS.com.
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I'm Stuart Church, a user experience consultant with Pure Usability in Bristol, UK. Sensorydrive is my personal blog and covers user experience design, information architecture, product design, psychology, research methods, perception and pretty much anything else that takes my fancy! You can find out a bit more about me if you want...
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I’ve looked at most of the carts you mentioned and have to say that Karova store looks the best of the bunch.
I’m currently researching ecommerce solutions and its down to between karova and tradingeye. What concerns me about tradingeye is (besides the fact its the more expensive option!!
) – if you do a google search there is loads of stuff about security vulnerabilities with it – the last thing i want is for my clients site to be hacked!!! That really does worry me, I think the vulnerability has been patched but if there was one theres likely to be more – any advice?
Hi Brad
Sorry for the delay in replying. I’m afraid that I’m not really techie enought to give you any advice on the quality of the code for tradingeye (or any of the other carts). However, given that you can never be 100% sure that an app is totally secure, I’d say it’s also important to think about how efficient a company/community is at issuing updates. The two main open source CMSs that I use – Wordpress and Drupal – have both had several security patches over the past year, but I’ve never really felt at risk of being hacked (famous last words!). I guess that the stakes are higher with an e-commerce site, but that’s also a very good reason to mitigate risk by going with a third party provider for credit card handling.
Hi Brad,
Thank for your interest in Tradingeye. Firstly please check out this post:
http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/archives/an_ecommerce_strategic_partnership.html
Also as far as price we have some really good discounts with up to 50% off each license!
http://www.tradingeye.com/developers/
In answer to you vulnerability question, this was a very minor issue in v4 (click on large image) which was patched immediately but Tradingeye is on v5 and security has always been one of our top priorities alongside accessibility, standards and SEO.
Kind Regards,
Wladimir
Tradingeye