What is the best way to do Ecommerce on Modx Revo?

Hi all,

I have a friend who runs an information centre that also has a cafe and a SMALL book shop attached to it. He wants me to create a website for the information centre with a shop added to it. I'm going to create the website using Modx Revo of course but my question is.....what's the best way to create the shop on Modx? He'll be selling a limited amount of books and t-shirts to start with. SimpleCart, MiniShop2 or BluCart? Any recommendations? I'd really appreciate your input

Colin

SimpleCart would probably suffice for a small book store.

Quote from: lkfranklin at May 11, 2018, 11:46 AM

SimpleCart would probably suffice for a small book store.

Thanks a million LK for your reply. Would it still be okay if he decided to add more products i.e. tshirts, hoodies, mugs etc.?

No probs.

I'd say yes and no. You can add any type of product but things like clothing tend to have product attributes (sizes, colours etc) which is not SimpleCarts forte. Modmore do offer free development licenses so if you setup a version of MODX on your localhost and then download SimpleCart from the modmore api you can check it out in depth before purchasing. They also have a demo online.

Quote from: lkfranklin at May 12, 2018, 06:41 AM

No probs.

I'd say yes and no. You can add any type of product but things like clothing tend to have product attributes (sizes, colours etc) which is not SimpleCarts forte. Modmore do offer free development licenses so if you setup a version of MODX on your localhost and then download SimpleCart from the modmore api you can check it out in depth before purchasing. They also have a demo online.

Thanks again LK. I'd say that simple cart will do nicely. At the moment it's just books. Are there any other plugins for ecommerce? Do you know anything about MiniShop2 or BluCart?

MiniCart is great but the documentation is in Russian last time I checked so it can be difficult to follow along and get it setup. I haven't tried blucart myself but if you're looking for a more comprehensive ecommerce system then you may want to look into Commerce which is also from modmore.

Alternatively, OpenCart is a great open source platform that is very comprehensive, well supported and easy to use. There are also some snippets available to pull products into the front end of a modx website if you wanted to create some kind of bridge.

While it depends on the exact requirements, I'd generally recommend Commerce instead of SimpleCart these days.

Commerce is officially in beta, but ready to use in production if it has the features you need. We still want to add things like invoicing and sale pricing before calling it 1.0, hopefully, this summer/autumn.

One important distinction between SimpleCart and Commerce, is that SimpleCart was born out of a specific webshop, which was then made to support other use cases and released as an extra. Commerce was built from scratch to be usable as a platform for a much wider array of e-commerce use cases that can be extended and built upon. Many of the core features in Commerce (like coupons and address validation) are added as modules that can be enabled/disabled/extended without getting in the way of keeping your site upgraded.

We're also starting to see community-built extensions for Commerce getting released in the past few months, which I think is quite exciting to see happening

For a book store with some merchandise, SimpleCart can probably work just fine. Some features that would push you into Commerce would be flexible shipping prices (SimpleCart supports only fixed price options with "free from $X", Commerce has weight/country/tablerates and the possibility for fulfillment API integrations), payment gateways (Commerce has all the gateways SimpleCart has, and then some), and more powerful taxation rules including a "prices inclusive of VAT" mode.


MiniShop2 is also a very capable solution, which has the benefit of a very large community and extensive list of available extensions. The primary things it lacks is taxes and while there are a ton of payment gateways available, common western gateways are missing. It's cataloging features are impressive though

Not sure what happened with BluCart. It looked interesting at the time, and FoxyCart (these days just called "Foxy") is a very mature and powerful platform to integrate with, but I don't recall ever seeing BlueCart getting publicly released. This forum post suggests it's no longer being worked on.

Quote from: lkfranklin at May 14, 2018, 08:43 AM

MiniCart is great but the documentation is in Russian last time I checked so it can be difficult to follow along and get it setup. I haven't tried blucart myself but if you're looking for a more comprehensive ecommerce system then you may want to look into Commerce which is also from modmore.

Alternatively, OpenCart is a great open source platform that is very comprehensive, well supported and easy to use. There are also some snippets available to pull products into the front end of a modx website if you wanted to create some kind of bridge.

You're a star LK....thnaks a million

Quote from: markh at May 14, 2018, 09:17 AM

While it depends on the exact requirements, I'd generally recommend Commerce instead of SimpleCart these days.

Commerce is officially in beta, but ready to use in production if it has the features you need. We still want to add things like invoicing and sale pricing before calling it 1.0, hopefully, this summer/autumn.

One important distinction between SimpleCart and Commerce, is that SimpleCart was born out of a specific webshop, which was then made to support other use cases and released as an extra. Commerce was built from scratch to be usable as a platform for a much wider array of e-commerce use cases that can be extended and built upon. Many of the core features in Commerce (like coupons and address validation) are added as modules that can be enabled/disabled/extended without getting in the way of keeping your site upgraded.

We're also starting to see community-built extensions for Commerce getting released in the past few months, which I think is quite exciting to see happening

For a book store with some merchandise, SimpleCart can probably work just fine. Some features that would push you into Commerce would be flexible shipping prices (SimpleCart supports only fixed price options with "free from $X", Commerce has weight/country/tablerates and the possibility for fulfillment API integrations), payment gateways (Commerce has all the gateways SimpleCart has, and then some), and more powerful taxation rules including a "prices inclusive of VAT" mode.


MiniShop2 is also a very capable solution, which has the benefit of a very large community and extensive list of available extensions. The primary things it lacks is taxes and while there are a ton of payment gateways available, common western gateways are missing. It's cataloging features are impressive though

Not sure what happened with BluCart. It looked interesting at the time, and FoxyCart (these days just called "Foxy") is a very mature and powerful platform to integrate with, but I don't recall ever seeing BlueCart getting publicly released. This forum post suggests it's no longer being worked on.

Thanks Mark Hamstra. I appreciate all the information.

At the moment the client has decided that for now he only wants a website but will be looking to add a shop in the very near future.