To name a few:
Zen Cart
Magento
Opencart
osCommerce
…
I’m starting an online store with about 50,000 products. Unlike blogging, there’s pretty much no better choice than Wordpress. But for an online store, there are so many applications to choose from.
What is your choice of the shopping cart application / software for PHP+MySQL hosting? Anyone has any good experience with a few of them to make a comparison?
Thanks a lot!
50,000 products is a lot! Does that include variations of the same product? For example, a t-shirt may be small, medium, large and then also blue, green, yellow, etc. Are you treating each combination as a different product?
Magento is by far the most powerful from the ones you have listed, but it’s also the most complicated. I would imagine that whichever solution you consider must have some way to import a product database. Entering 50,000 products by hand would be a nightmare. Given that you have such a large product database, I would imagine that you’re looking for a powerful and feature-rich system over others. If that’s the case, I would recommend Magento.
Thanks for your suggestion Jeff.
I’m no expert (so just skip anything I have to say… 
)
I started a business a few years ago and decided on Zen-Cart because of the name recognition and seeing a lot of recommendations for it. One of my concerns (back before 2008) was that it didn’t quite seem very modern. I don’t like it’s administrative interface. But it looked like there was active talk about them coming out with a brand new version that was going to be what sounded like a pretty good overhaul from the ground up.
The, at some point in 2008, somebody on the team posted a not telling people to stop asking when the next release was coming out. We were told to trust that they are working on it and when they have some kind of news to share, they’d let us know.
It’s now about 2.5-3 years, I lost faith. 2-3 Three years with no news or progress worth reporting to the user base?
I almost decided to go with some kind of hosted solution and some of them seem pretty good. My store has 150 items in it, but I hope to get it to 500 in the next year or so.
Now I see that they’ve released an update into Beta that includes some new features, but it’s not the 2.0 version that I’m really waiting on. Still they aren’t suggesting any sort of timeframe, or announcing details about their progress.
I have some fairly tricky shipping requirements, otherwise, I might have considered MagentoGo (hosted) or 3dcart (hosted).
I’m looking at Magento now, I am going to download Magento Community Edition and I think I’ve found a solution that will handle my confusing shipping options.
Also, eBay recently announced X.Commerce and it was revealed that they have made a major investment into Magento.
Since I also sell on Amazon and eBay, and I’m needing to pull all of this together, I’m leaning towards Magento at this point.
Admittedly, I’m confused as hell. And like the OP, mentioned… ya, Wordpress is a clear standout in the world of Blogging/CMS systems. I use it and love it. I think it’s top of the line. Now I want the eCommerce solution which is on that same level. Where is it?
A lof of my friends use the zen cart ecommerce store to list the items.coz it is easier to manage in the admin.and we can upload thousands of items in one time.and it is stored with php,mysql programming technology.which is familiar to us.But Magento seems more professional and powerful than zen cart.even though it is complicated to use.
Default CS-Cart works perfectly well with up to 500 000 products. The running speed and functioning of your CS-Cart store on the whole will depend on a number of factors, such as the server’s performance capacity, amount of products, referencing intensity etc.
In case you are planning to have 1 000 000 items for instance, it may require some extra optimization to allow your store to handle such number of products.
Besides, you would surely need to rent a high-productive dedicated server in this case. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that such measures, as additional optimization or the use of a powerful server are not required in most cases unless one needs to run a large-scale web store with a complex structure of a catalog.
CS-cart looks pretty good. How many people are currently using it? Never heard about it before yet it seems it’s a rather mature product. Will seriously consider it.
Is there any substantial discount here for me and or the SP members? 
Hello Yangyang,
There are many shopping carts these days. I suggest you should try different software because you will never know if the software good enough until you try it. Remember, the success of your business depends on the software and hosting you choose. So, choose wisely!
yeah,in my opinion ,Zen-Cart is more popular ,such as <snip>link deleted</snip> ,this web site is hot selling,of course one of important reasons is it uses the Zen-Cart system.
He’s promoting his own business… something that he shouldn’t do because we don’t allow that!
This doesn’t mean that I have an opinion on his product. I don’t know since I never tried it. I’m afraid that I can’t help because my needs have always been quite small and any would do
Let’s analyze this by criteria.
Security.
I have read that WordPress, and therefore any WordPress shopping cart, is insecure. Any truth to that? For an ecommerce site, security should be the highest priority.
Speed.
I have never been impressed with Ubercart’s speed. But then, I have not used Ubercart in about two years. I have also heard bad things about Magento’s speed.
Ease to learn, setup, and manage.
Usually, the more powerful solutions, are also the resource intensive, and the most difficult to manage.
Advanced features.
Such as integration with Quickbooks, or special inventory features.
Stability and reliability.
Ease of customizing.
I have read that OS-Commerce is a pain.
Popularity.
It matters. If you want to hire somebody to work on your site, it would be a lot easier to find a WordPress developer, than a developer for many other solutions.
Annoyances.
When Drupal comes out with a new version, they typically offer limited backwards compatibility. This can be a serious PITA for people who have put a lot into their sites.
So what I have I missed?
For me Magento works…
I’ve used Zen-Cart for years, but I prefer Magento now. Unfortunately I’m terrified to try and move my Zen-Cart sites over to Magento…and it sounds like a ton of work
I think that Magento with tons of extension is better that everything else.
The thing with Magento is that it is very expensive
Exactly. It’s a great system, yet everything but free - you’ll see that when:
Although there are many online stores who offers a wide variety of shopping carts but my concern is to find out a solution which is SEO friendly as well. Normally a shopping cart provide many dynamic urls and sessions so SEO friendliness with enhanced security should be primary thing to search for.
So many posts about preference of ecommerce solution or shopping cart. In reality, there is no solution that work for everyone. With some research and test runs comes right choice or the shopping cart.
I did quite a lot of research when I had to decide which is the best and most stable eCommerce platform and many experts in forums and blog posts that I read were saying that OpenCart is the best one. Magento is also good but from my retail experience there are still many bugs that need to be fixed. We had problems with the product upload. It was very slow! Site speed is also a problem which lowers the conversion rate. With Magento it is also difficult to customize the template. You need to be a real expert to do that. I hope this helps!
I only use 1Shopping cart for my business. I am using it for almost 2 years now and I haven’t got any problem about it. I am recommending it to all.
The problem you may have with a hosted shopping cart is the costs for the amount of products you want to add. A lot of hosted carts package they’re deals dependant on how many products you’re going to add. I’d say you’d be better sticking to an installable version of one of the shopping carts. 50,000 is a lot, assuming you’re not a startup have you considered having something tailored specifically for you?