CS-Cart Professional: Shopping Cart Software.

User Reviews 

Displaying 1-5 out of 45 reviews

• 

  Excellent Features, Value for Money & Support

  Rating: 1 - Poor
  Reviewed by on Mar 7th, 2011

  I have used various shopping carts like OSCommerce, Zencart, Cubecart, Interspire, Bigcommerce, X-cart, and have live sites on most of them (except Interspire). I have now finished setting up one store with around 800 products with CS-Cart V 2.1.3, and as per my experience of 1 month, it blows the competitors out of the water, IMHO. Let me back this up with concrete data: a) Features: This is where CS-Cart leaves other scripts far behind. Based on my experience of buying and adding mods, I fully endorse the views expressed in http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=499 , where the poster states that Cs-Cart includes mods worth $ 800 in-built. Another very powerful feature is the “Blocks” & “Hooks” feature. It makes the cart infinitely customizable, without messing around with PHP files. b) Support: In my opinion, this is the biggest strength of the company. The support personnel are extremely professional, knowledgeable and come across as willing to solve your problems. You typically get response within 1 day (less for me, since my time zone is only +2 hours). Some people had implied that support folks try to sell their custom development services. In my opinion, and experience so far, this is an unfair allegation. I have found (like some other posters had also shared), that the support team does help you do minor design changes within the purview of support. You only need to look at the quality of the Knowledgebase at kb.cs-cart.com to get a realistic view of how serious Simbirsk is about helping getting people the maximum from their cart investment. In the last 30 days, I have begun to have a sense of camaraderie with the support folks, and I am very comfortable approaching them with “dumb questions” or minor tweaks, knowing that they will help me meet my needs. For about $ 65 a month (if you go for month-on-month support packs), you get access to people who already know the system in & out. For people like me who don’t know PHP & CSS, it is very useful. If you know both, you can choose to do without this, since the Forums, User Guide (168 pager!) and the KB are very detailed. I intend to take this, and treat it like a part-time employee cost to help me keep tweaking the system to meet my needs. The only odd thing here is that they have a point vs period based support (beyond initial 30 days), and I just can’t see the value of the points based system. Please read both plans carefully, but I honestly can’t see people choosing the point based system for ongoing support. c) Speed: You might have heard that speed has historically been CS-Cart’s bete-noire. The last few versions have speeded up the cart considerably (I tested it last in 2009). While I will not claim that it is the fastest cart around, it is fast enough, even on shared hosting. Plus the team is constantly working on this. Plus the forum has people spending a lot of time helping us extract maximum speed from the latest versions. See http://blog.cs-cart.com/2011/02/01/cscart-213-released/#more-883 and http://forum.cs-cart.com/showthread.php?t=20534 d) Documentation & Open-ness: The whole thing is open PHP code – so I know that anything is achievable down the line. You also need to see the quality of documentation at http://docs.cs-cart.com/ where these guys even have guides like HTML basics, CSS basics, Smarty basics, Common design changes! This has been very useful to me, and tells a lot about the orientation of the company towards helping customers (instead of peddling paid support like some other “large companies”) My last point before I wrap up: The Open Source bandwagon – I think these ultimately cost more in terms of time wasted, trying to get various mods to behave, with each other, and solving problems. If you are highly technical, then open source carts may make sense to you. Sorry if I have offended some fans! What scared me with such carts is that i) Security Vulnerabilites don’t get patched automatically and ii) The vulnerabilities are more known to hackers and I just don’t have the bandwidth to get them to commercial grade on my own. You guys can do your own google searches of “Cs-Cart VS …” - I am not going to bash any particular cart in my review. All carts have certain flaws, but in my opinion, CS-Cart gives the best balance of features, value for money & reliability, along with a very responsive support. If you are still on the fence, I strongly recommend you to take a look at kb.cs-cart.com, the developer docs section of the cs-cart.com and the user guide. That way, you don’t even have to download & install the cart (they give a 60 day free trial), to get a sense of how good this product is. Highly recommended! P.S.: I am not an employee of the company; neither do I stand to get any benefit for this detailed review. I have been to a lot of pain bouncing from cart to cart over the years till I reached CS, and I am putting this detailed review to present my experiences.

  Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

• 

  Excellent Solution and Service

  Rating: 5 - Excellent
  Reviewed by on May 5th, 2010

  I've used many shopping cart solutions in the past and I have to say that hands down, this is the most powerful and easy to use solution. I am a wordpress developer, and I'd say that that the backend admin is on par with wordpress as far as UI goes. I was in a marketing meeting with high level designers and web developers and they were very impressed with the checkout process, backend and range of features that cs-cart has to offer right out of the box. In addition, I was concerned about getting into a shopping cart solution that didn't offer support, and i have to say that the support has been A+. They get back to me within a day, and are clear on answering all of my questions. The bottom line is that you will be hard pressed to find the value, integration, features and support for a cart at this price. Keep up the great work cs-cart, I look forward to working with you long term!

  Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

• 

  A++ service

  Rating: 5 - Excellent
  Reviewed by on Apr 26th, 2010

  I bought CS-cart for more than 1 year ago, I found a little bug on it, and because I was not able to fix it, they went to my FTP and fixed it, and that in almost in no time.... BTW, they also told me they also fixed a bug on my server too ;-) This is what i call a A++ service level

  Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend

• Suspect at best

  Rating: 1 - Poor
  Reviewed by on Dec 28th, 2011

  Obviously the positive reviews are from insiders at Cs Cart and after reading the reviews here it is obvious that this Company is not transparent. I have recently had the most horrific experience with this Russian Company who produce Cs Cart. I have proof for everything I say. Firstly their major releases are bug ridden, as many people suggest purposely as they want you to buy their expensive support. Everybody who uses CS Cart soon becomes aware of this. In my case over the Xmas period their support staff entered my code via FTP without my permission (they had FTP access for another prior problem), they subsequently damaged my site and left it, they then refused to fix the damage they caused insisting that they rolled back the changes and that my site has been extensively developed and therefore I should get a specialist to fix the problem. They just refuse to fix the damage they have caused. I have a back up of my site taken on the 25th Dec 11 and my site Category Promotion functions were fine, on the 26th after they accessed my Code my site was damaged. Nobody but CS Cart Support had access to my site. This Company has a custom development dept (they pass you on to them after deducting support tickets each time you have a problem, invariably they tell you that your problem is not covered in Support, that you should consider their custom development and ask if you would like to be redirected to get a quotation - they also deduct tickets even for the quotations they give you - so what trouble would it be, yet they simply refuse to repair what they have done). So I am left during the SALE period without a developer and my site damaged. This is the sort of Company you will be dealing with. I would happily explain to every single person in detail why they should avoid CS Cart. Get involved with CS Cart at your peril. I am still shocked at the treatment I have received from them. I have also of course been kicked out of the forum when I posted my experiences with them. They are faceless so naturally they believe they can do what they like without consequence.Please please stay away from CS Cart.

  Bottom Line: No, I would not recommend this to a friend

• Very good script.

  Rating: 5 - Excellent
  Reviewed by Carlos Taveras on Sep 24th, 2011

  The software is great, good price, works good. Very recommended.

  Bottom Line: Yes, I would recommend this to a friend