OpenCart vs. PrestaShop vs. Shift4Shop

OpenCart is best suited for business owners looking to sell their products online. Building an OpenCart website requires no or minimal coding knowledge. Being a self-hosted system, it is not recommended for people who have no hosting plan or have no experience in hosting websites so it would be better to go with another platform that is hosted elsewhere.

This is a great system for small and medium businesses dealing from 1 product to 100,000 products. It is elegant to use and very stable. The system may not be great for converting into a marketplace and the handling of > 1million products. The system is also not suitable for services selling like events, registrations, subscriptions and ticket bookings etc.

At this point I would recommend looking elsewhere - 8 years with a platform and finally have to switch due to the unreliability is not something a business likes to do! They should sell the platform to a company that actually cares about owning an ecommerce builder. Research Shift4 - the parent

• OpenCart is well suited in cases where our eCommerce web development clients want a very specific design with very specific shopping cart functionalities.
• OpenCart is very flexible in its native ability to work with a wide variety of payment processors and payment gateways.
• OpenCart makes it both fast and easy to setup and configure a new shopping cart website, especially if you use one of the pre-made templates.

Incentivized

• The PayPal button modality was integrated with the PrestaShop system, which helped our clients to complete payments digitally in just a few seconds, this integrated button allowed to streamline many transactions.
• Performing inventory reviews and modifying the PrestaShop catalog was one of the things that I liked the most, I could make changes to the catalog, make changes to the conditions of the products in the catalog and all those changes were reflected on my website in a instant, no need to wait some time.
• The PrestaShop system created a digital invoice for each client who made the advance payment of a property, which made it even easier to complete the property negotiation. Customers came to our company with the digital invoice for the advance payment and it was easy to identify the property that was paid, thanks to the digital invoice.

Incentivized

• In my opinion, charge you too much for what it is worth
• In my opinion, tech support is always blaming client and end up fixing it own issues
• In my experience, make you believe client is important

• It's a very buggy platform. Although OpenCart developers release new versions time to time after fixing bugs every version of OpenCart has a different type of bug.
• It should increase the security of the platform.

Incentivized

• Not a lot of free templates.
• Images can sometimes be too compressed and lose their full quality, so better settings for that could be introduced.
• Being able to change the look of your automatic emails via default settings can also be introduced.

Incentivized

• Page structure is all over the place. It can be difficult to find where to go to make page edits.
• Base platform isn't very robust and requires multiple add-ons in order to add CRM, Taxes, and other capabilities
• Reporting isn't very strong, necessitating outside analytics
• File system is also pretty wonky and feels very primitive
• Customer service and technical help leaves MUCH to be desired.
• Not as many supported add-ons/plug-ins as other platforms, and many of them cost additional fees. Many of them also don't seamlessly integrate, meaning you'll need to dev the integration yourself.
• In general, what you see in the WYSIWYG is not what you get.
• Order System is not very intuitive for the modern era

Incentivized

Considering the problems we had and still have, 0.

Not applicable - as a franchisee, the franchiser took over the web site and shopping cart capabilities, so I no longer need the tool. But I would recommend it.

The lack of performance and the unstable system make it very hard to use it for a serious e-commerce application.

If you are looking for ultra basic interface ...

100s of implementation and so far no major security breaches.

regular updates braking our site

Some caching and optimization is definitely needed. However, it is not as bloated as other CMSs with lots of plugins needed.

Since we use PrestaShop OpenSource there is only community support. What we found is that many other users fight with the same problems and there seems no solution or input from the PrestaShop developers' side.

You always manage to fins someone, but, in my experience, resolving issues are not an easy task. Why do we pay for a service , and then spend time trouble shooting constantly with them ?? In my experience, they eliminate features , send you an email what you can use instead, with instructions most people cant do without an IT guy . It feel more like an open source than a true integrated service.

Initially it was difficult to manage the UI to the client, and then hard to change anything , unless you used the boring and too generic templates . Their template selection is very limited , that are basically all the same with different background images and colours . If you are unfortunate to have been a long-time client, you will have to completely rebuild your store, because old templates are not supported anymore

Honestly, when consulting my clients, I would always recommend WooCommerce over OpenCart. Although I've had clients that had existing OpenCart websites and they were fairly happy with them, making additions/changes/customizations from a developer standpoint was not the easiest compared to other systems. For very large shops, I always recommend Magento over anything else.

Incentivized

It's a no-brainer for e-commerce stores. BigCommerce and Magento both far out-distanced PrestaShop in every major category. If you're just getting into e-commerce, I would highly recommend either BigCommerce or Magento. Their online documentation and support far outweigh any advantages you'd have over going with an open source software like PrestaShop.

Incentivized

We used them for 2 years and had minor problems up until the end. For the last 2 months, customers were unable to checkout, or connect to our payment processor. We put in like 3 to 5 hot tickets to get fixed and day after day nothing was fixed and support got ruder and ruder with us! We lost thousands of dollars online with this company and now they are chasing us for a renewal payment! Simply put, this is bad software with a poor customer care staff!

This is the best example of "If it's not broken, don't fix it!".

• Clients loves the design which is easy to integrate to; you can integrate multiple themes.
• Overall user experience is good, so number of conversions is good.

Incentivized

• It slowed down our Hosting service. Our website took a long time to fully load on our clients' devices due to the high consumption of the integration with the PrestaShop service.
• It provided us with a fast billing service, where our clients obtained invoices in PDF mode for the electronic payments they made for the properties. These digital invoices helped us to recognize the property they wanted faster and streamlined the negotiation process.
• The templates that had an optimized design, were too expensive, this caused that our catalog design was very simple and did not capture the interest of customers.

Incentivized

• We have seen an increase in sales of 440% since starting with 3D cart.
• We find that the 3D features of promotions, coupon codes, rewards points all make customers want to come to us or come back to us.
• They made mobile conversion pretty easy, and our mobile traffic went from 33% to 54%.

Incentivized