Presta vs. CS-Cart?

[osu9400]

Well... I thought I had it all figured out. I had planned on building a site with CS-Cart. It has most of what I would think should be in a shopping cart system, has tons of templates, a free version, etc... Now, I find PrestaShop and am reconsidering CSCart. I am downloading 1.4RC5 now to evaluate but does anyone have a comparison matrix between these two systems? Anyone have experience with both and want to pass on some wisdom?

[Pixel]

We developed a shop in CSC using the previous version that was stable (v1.3.5). It works fine, and has some really good multi-edit features if you need to add/delete/edit products in large amounts frequently. You may find you need to spend a fair bit of time fine-tuning and fixing things (template and code) though, depending on your needs.

The big problem (IMO) with CSC though is the support structure and the unrespon$ive attitude of the dev team. You have to have a current support contract to get any info (or bugfixes in between releases) from them - there's no SVN. And your 30-day support contract period starts the moment you put your first request in, and can disappear very quickly when they take a whole day each time to reply (once per day, just before they go home) to your support request, often just asking you to 'Please explain'. Any request for support which isn't a bug usually has the reply 'We can offer you custom programming for $$$' - and that can be $100 to $500 or more each time. We wouldn't do another shop using CSC.

So, it really depends how competent you are with code and what features you need - if you can buy a copy of CSC and then do the rest yourself, and you need features that aren't yet available in PS, then CSC may be the right choice. But then PS is developing quickly, and more modules (both paid and free) are becoming available all the time. And the PS team are very responsive (usually) to any bugs, problems or feature requests. PS is also quite easy to work with - the code base is much smaller.

[CrS27]

Prestashop features an easy to use back office, plus it has huge range of add ons and exstentions,

Comes with a lot of out-of-the box add ons (site map, friendly URL, customer notify, vouchers etc) but it has some problems, like too many updates. Also, the addons can be quite pricey. Still, you don't have to pay for the starting package.

In general, Prestashop is faster than CS-Cart, it is really easy to set up and install and it's a good choice for small stores or start-ups. But for big business, in my book, it may be better to choose something more featured.