Ecsyle - Roy Lindauer: Litecommerce is good, but I want more

Litecommerce is good, but I want more

We recently finished a website redesign for an established online house plan vendor. Along with the redesign of the look and feel of the site, we were tasked with upgrading their ancient online shopping system. We chose to use Litecommerce for our ecommerce platform since we love their other product, X-Cart. X-Cart was the best option we found for small to medium businesses looking to start selling online, or for those that needed a more complete, versatile system. These are not Amazon level players, and their requirements were light. Litecommerce was attractive first because of X-Cart and our wonderful experiences with it, and second, because of its price. It’s cheap. The basic package is $95 and is enough to get started on a very small store. The third reason was that it was built with expansion in mind. Their system is easy (easy-ish?) to extend and customize. From their website:

With years of experience in e-commerce software industry we designed LiteCommerce to meet the most challenging requirements set by business owners. Clear separation of template system, code and data makes the software highly adaptable for actual business needs: look & feel can be updated with your favorite HTML editor like DreamWeaver or FrontPage; add-on API along with open source allows the functionality extended/altered according to your individual e-commerce needs.

The clients only strict requirement was that its search feature had to have specific features that are not a part of your basic ecommerce system. We were able to write our own custom search engine that extends the basic functionality of their default search engine as well as optimized the overall speed of the search. Our search actually runs faster than the default search.

On the negative side of things, the system is slow, and the API documentation is very poor. They also claim it is open source, but it is not licensed as such. We can edit some of the code, but not all of it. The guts of the program are encrypted. Finally, support is a pain in the ass only because of the time difference. They are located in Russia, I am on the west coast of America. It takes at least 24 hours to get a response.

While putting this system together I realized that I really don’t know about the other options for ecommerce. OSCommerce and Zencart seem to be popular, but I was unimpressed. What I really want is a platform, like a framework, to build a truly customized experience. Something like Codeigniter or Expression Engine, but aimed at online shopping.