I only have experience with a small handful of shopping carts, and the two that I can definitely say stay away from are Zen Cart and osCommerce. Being free is not a money saver.

Example: A site that I am working on (and I agreed to take over before learning it was built using Zen Cart) has 100′s of products that require options (size, color, shipping weight increases for the larger sizes). There isn’t any way to clone those attributes so they have to be setup for each product, and you can’t set up options until there is a product. Ugh!!! So last night I spent a good couple of hours setting up a spreadsheet to I can import it into Zen Cart database to save at least 12 hours of work (yes there are that many products and at my hourly rate that’s $840.00).

Now if they were using my favorite ecommerce solution (Ecommerce Templates) I would just setup my options (Size, Color, etc.) and when adding the product select the option I wanted from the product Admin as I was adding the product. So easy! And you can clone products and options so if you have a product or option that is very similar to an existing one…just clone and modify it.

Programming Language: PHP and ASP

Another favorite cart is OptionCart, the Deluxe version. While you have to be a reseller to purchase it’s an easy process to sign up. While you cannot clone options, just setup the one product that will use the same options multiple times, copy and paste the resultant information (I paste the info into a text file). Then as you are adding the product just go and grab the information. OptionCart uses Mals-e as the shopping cart. It costs nothing to sign up, and if you don’t use anything other than PayPal or want to manually process the credit card there’s no monthly fee. However, if you want to use PayPal Pro or an automatic payment processor such as Authorizenet then there is a modest monthly fee.

Programming Language: PHP

I’ve heard good things about Magento, but haven’t worked with it yet, and I do remember hearing that the options is bulky but that was quite a while ago so perhaps they have improved it.

Programming Language: PHP

Another one I looked at recently is TradingEye. I loved the back end and didn’t get to play with it enough (they refreshed the database too often), but I found adding products easy, but adding just pages and linking to them proved to be difficult. If they improve it I’ll certainly recommend.

Programming Language: PHP

Design: Ecommerce Templates and OptionCart Deluxe just require a few include files. Just plop them into your design (and you are not restricted the boxy look of Zen Cart or osCommerce).

Cost: Zen Cart and osCommerce are free. Ecommerce Templates and OptionCart Deluxe are under $150.00 but the time saved more than makes up for the cost.

There are also a great many other ecommerce solutions, and I have a very long list of them that are superb for small stores or if you want to sell downloadable products.