Shopping Cart Review – Cube Cart
I’ve been building websites for along time, and I’ve encountered about every category of website; blog software, CMS systems, etc. I mostly prefer to hand code sites.
One thing I had never ventured into was e-commerce. So when it came to picking shopping cart software, I didn’t have much to go on. I’d heard about oscommerce, so that is where I started. I quickly concluded that while oscommerce was probably stable and probably secure, it seemed that it had not been updated for years. I also read some stories about how much time and effort needs to be done to customize the product. I had also heard a little bit about ZenCart, so I downloaded and setup a demo store to start testing it out. Everything went well, not many problems, the back-end had a ton of options. It didn’t take too long for me to get it setup the way I wanted. After that I started to look at the SEO of Zen Cart, it had nothing built in, but there were add-on modules for it. From this research it seemed the SEO worked well, but not great, and that some people were having to install many SEO modules to get the SEO just right. In my mind I am thinking of the many hours that would be spend trying to make Zen Cart just right. Not really what I wanted to do.
Hosted cart solutions? I found some pretty nice SEO hosted cart solutions. All of them had big promises, but also pretty big prices. Setup fee’s and monthly charges add a lot of fixed cost to an online store. One of the reasons for an online store is the low cost, low overhead, all that is what makes online shopping competitive. An online shop has no opportunity for people to come in and touch and personally see merchandise, so it has to win on price. Winning on price usually means little to no overhead. Also if you ever have a problem with the hosted cart, or they go bankrupt, you could be left with nothing.
At this point I am beyond a “free” cart solution. Open source is great, but the security of having a paid staff always watching and patching sounds very nice. So now there are many many paid cart software packages. Seems to be 3 levels. $300 and under, $300-$1000, and then from there it seemed the sky was the limit, from $1000 to $5000, sometimes more even. Now if an e-commerce store really takes off, I’d have no problem paying for a high volume cart solution, but I didn’t want to pay that much just to get started with a small online store (less than 1000 products).
CubeCart was reasonable priced at $189. They appear to have paid developers and support staff. An active helpdesk and bug tracking system going on, all good things. So I download a 30 day trial of the software. CubeCart has an easy to use SEO setting that you can turn on in the backend of the system. SEO seems well thought out, and just about every part of the basic SEO process can be set page by page. The URL’s setup was also good, placing category names and product names right into the URL. Perfect. I did choose to go with Cube cart. All my pages (products) were indexed very well within only a few days. Search engine traffic is already coming in from keywords. Now the 2 drawbacks to CubeCart are that the software is encoded, and requires a license key that checks against CubeCart’s servers. The encoding means most the core system php files cannot be seen or changed. This worries me a little for the reasons I didn’t like a hosted cart. If CubeCart closed their doors, would I be left out in the cold with a cart that would stop working? I hope not… but the benefits and price of the CubeCart software out-weighed these fears. So off we go on an e-commerce adventure.
*update* Please read the comments below, a Cube Cart representative has cleared up the encoding details with a promise that if for whatever reason the development stopped, they would open up all the encoded files for their customers. Thank you Al for clearing that up. (Note: I have no reason to think the development would stop, but you just never know.)
16 Responses to “Shopping Cart Review – Cube Cart”
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Thanks for the reviews on shopping cart software. Very helpful.
Thanks for the review. I’m curious, in your shopping cart quest, did you had a chance to evaluate at shopsite, Miva merchant, and/or goEcart? Another one I found full of features was an open source product called Magento.
r2go,
I looked at shopsite a little bit, but I didn’t like their SEO as much. I don’t remember looking at Miva or goEcart. I did really check out Magento, I even downloaded and installed it, but it was not yet out of a beta release, but it looked really nice (a little slow though).
Shopsite 9 has a little more SEO capabilities. For example, there used to be a limitation on page naming, but according to a rep I spoke with, pages naming is extremely flexibel.
I think Magento has a real upside, but I’m concerned about the learning curve. I have several existing sites that I need to migrate to a new platform. I also have several new sites I want to launch. I’d like to start with 1 or 2 on new platform to test and then migrate the rest.
It seems that most shopping carts have some limitations regarding SEO. Is there anyone that stands out as your top pick?
Hello,
Thanks for an interesting review. Sorry for an off-topic question, but is it possible to contact you in any way (I’d like to send an e-mail)?
Yes, you can email me at
Thanks for such a positive review of our product CubeCart. To address your concerns concerning the software licensing.
The company right now is profitable and going from strength to strength thank to our customers such as yourself. If we were to go bust one day (possible) we would release new files so that your cart would stay on line. We are responsible and couldn’t bear to think that our failure would impact other businesses.
Also the software license system connects to two servers each in different data centres in the US. Your store calls homes once a fortnight to validate the software license key. In the unlikely event it calls home whilst the primary software license server is down it will try the second one. For this reason it is exceptionally unlikely (touches wood) that you would get software license errors.
I hope that helps.
Oh, I forgot to mention that only two files out of thousands are encoded. These are controller files that are used to call in others. There should be no restrictions to code customisations that can be made. Since the v4 release I don’t recall any customer not being able to achieve the bespoke functionality they want.
Al, thank you for clearing that up, that is exactly the response I would hope for. Keep up the good work.
We are in the process of launching another site and are looking for an alternative to Yahoo Store, OSCommerce and ZenCart. We have a HostGator reseller account and would like to try CubeCart, since it is already installed, but want to be absolutely certain before taking the plunge. How is your CubeCart experience so far?
I have been very happy with Cube Cart, we are going on 9 months now on the software. I have had only one experience with support, and it was handled and fixed fairly quickly. I would have no problem recommending the software. It also should run great on hostgator. Please let me know if you have any more specific questions about CubeCart.
I am looking at a replacement e-commerce solution and came down to two.
Cubecart or Magento. I have evaluations for both.
I have discouted Magento as there as there is very steep learning curve and I think to customise is gomg totake far longer than Cubecart.
Bespoking is far easier with Cubecart and sites can be developed far quicker.
I also looked a long time at Magento, at the time it was still in beta and just felt very slow and clunky. Cube Cart has been fairly easy to customize, I have even made a few of my own custom reports and a great export tool that imports orders into PayPal multi-order shipping.
Magento might be great software for developers, but anyone else will quickly find it’s far too difficult to use, even after it’s been installed on a server.
There are some really cool features which drew me to it in the first place, but I had no business trying to make this work. Setting up the credit card processing and UPS link for shipping is a trial and still doesn’t work after playing with it for four days. (You should only have to type-in the correct information, but according to lots of other users/developers…this isn’t the case with Magento.)
If you’re looking to test your programming skills and/or want some job security, Magento is the place to be. For those of us wanting to make money with a small to medium-sized e-commerce website, I recommend a hosted solution or maybe Cube Cart mentioned here.
I hope this “review” helps.
Greg, thanks for the fantastic review. I share many of the same feelings as you about Magento. I think there is still a promising future for Magento, but for now I’ll stick with CubeCart.