Hello everyone. I need some help and guidance. I have an existing UK website, ie www.uboughtit.com, selling IT hardware, software, peripherals, consumables etc. I have decided to re-vamp my site and bring it up to date. However, before I proceed to build my new site with Vodahost, I would like any comments and advice on which would be the best shopping cart option to choose, ie oscommerce or Soholaunch. The cart I require needs to be able to be capable of handling the following:

1. approx 2000 IT products - all from one UK main IT distributor.
2. multi-page format, drop-down menu etc.
3. credit/debit card payments.
4. able to upload products by: XML data feed, or Excel/CSV files, updated daily.

Can anyone suggest which would be the best shopping cart option to go for, which will be able to handle a multi-product page site? I am leaning towards oscommerce, purley because it seems to have been around a long time, is tried and trusted, and I guess is used by many sites.

Finally, a couple of questions about the design and templates. First of all - Flash. I appreciate Flash is slow to load, but will the increasing popularity of broadband and quicker downloading, make Flash a good choice, or would I be better settling for non-flash?

Last question - templates. I want to use a template. In view of my shopping cart requirements, ie oscommerce or Soholaunch, do I need a specific template type? I see there are some oscommerce templates available, (no Soholaunch specific). If I use the oscommerce shopping cart, do I have to use a oscommerce template, or will any template be suitable?

My computer skills are limited at this stage, and at the moment the prospect of designing my own site is a bit daunting. However, the tutorials I have read, and the comments of other new members make me feel that I can do this. I would appreciate any advice and guidance anyone can offer me. Thanks in advance.
Tony Brown
www.uboughtit.com

Tony

Both Products will do what you want. Soho comes with several dozen interchangeable templates, and theres also an addon site.. go visit soholaunch.com for more information and finding the addon site. If you note in fantastico, theres also more templates there that you can use in templates express.

Oscommerce also has numerous addons and templates to do what you want, run a search for those as well.

You can run flash with both products. You can customize drop down menus, and both will allow csv uploads/downloads etc.

Soholaunch is limited in SHIPPING options. Currently you can only opt for one type of shipping and it is not multi choiced. From ease of use stand point.. soho is much easier to manipulate, understand and operate.

Plus and minuses for both.

Good luck on your choices! Try installing BOTH and looking at them.

Karen

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Thanks Karen - I appreciate your comments, and will investigate further.

Tony Brown
www.uboughtit.com