I am working on a project where the customer needs a shopping cart to sell their products. Choosing a good shopping cart for a project isn’t normally a hard process, but this particular customer has over 150,000 products in many, many categories. So this shopping cart selection process is taking longer than usual because of these exacting needs. After many hours of research I have listed below the top shopping cart systems I have come across with some Pros and Cons in hopes that this may help you in choosing your next shopping cart system.

My needs:

• Able to maintain 150,000 or more products with many categories
• I prefer PHP as the programming language
• To be hosted on my own server
• Open Source so that I can edit/hack as I want
• Need to be able to automate many functions like adding/deleting products

Here are the top shopping carts I found that fit my needs. (If you know of anymore please let me know and I will consider those as well.)

Magento – http://www.magentocommerce.com

PROS

• Magento seems to be the crowd favorite right now. Lots of activity on the forums and lots of people developing themes for it as well (paid and free.)
• Lots of people editing/hacking the code to make it do some cool things.

CONS

• Slow to upload a lot of items. Only 1,200 items per hour! This is way too slow to do what I need done.
• I would have to do a lot of editing to make things just right

X-Cart - http://www.x-cart.com/

PROS

• Seems to be able to support large numbers of products.
• There is a Windows based store manager that will make it easier for my client to update their web site.
• Design is based on Smarty Template Engine so it should be fairly easy to have custom designs.

CONS

• It isn’t free. X-Cart Gold is $115+ and the Store Manager software is $149
• Not as Open Source as I would have liked.