I will start a little project with a shopping cart. I will need to make several modifications in the shopping cart.
So my question is "Which is the best PHP open source Shopping Cart" to work with and easy to modify.
Give me some clues.
Best Regards,
Magento is an easy leader at the moment. It's got lot's of up-to-date features and an easy to modify architecture. The downside that I've seen mentioned in other forums is that it's more suitable for technically minded people so might not be good for a beginner.
Having worked with virtually all major open source e-commerce platforms, this is by far my favorite. It's not as powerful as Magento, but it's very easy to learn how it works, create/modify modules and design templates. There's also a very active community and it's developed by a company that releases it as OpenSource, so it's being constantly improved. The new flagship version 1.4 is almost out (it's at RC5 right now).
Other alternatives are:
Magento: It's built using the Zend Framework and it's heavily MVC. If you're familiar with the Zend Framework, this might be a good solution for you. It's a lot more difficult and has a much steeper learning curve than PrestaShop.
TomatoCart: This is a fork of osCommerce 3.0 beta. The creators have tried hard to improve the platform, but osCommerce has a lot of rotten design and it's a mess to extend. I've tried creating a couple of modules and had many problems. There isn't much documentation to help you and the community is not very active.
VirtueMart: If you are familiar with Joomla, this might be an option. If you're not, you should stay away because you might have a few problems setting everything up correctly and integrate this component with your template.
osCommerce: Just stay away from this...
I've built a few (3 or 4ish) sites using zen cart. It's free, and it does waaaaaay more than anything I've ever needed it to do.
I've also used Squirrel cart. It's not free ($170), but it is easy to implement and has great support.
I have used both Magento and OpenCart and I can say that Magento wins hands down in terms of :
Effective multiple store management is Magento considerable advantage.
Concerning Open Cart, it has some benefits in terms of easy installation, as it's quite lightweight in comparison to Magento.
If you are planning little business without rapid development in the near future, OpenCart will be quite enough for you.
Magento is really demanding in terms of hosting, investment, efforts, so it better suits large size stores.
Like said above OpenCart is lightweight and simple to use.. recommended more for small stores and beginners.. Magento is way ahead and has larger extensions than opencart. magento is more technical to use.