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Ubercart: An alternative to the osCommerce shopping cart and Drupal's e-Commerce module

By Bryan - Posted on 27 September 2007

One of the things I like about browsing the Web for posts on various CMS topics is that they always seem to show up on the Web when when I need them the most.  For example, I'm starting to consider whether I'll continue to use osCommerce for some sites that I manage.  While the yet to be released osCommerce 3.0 will likely be an option next year, I'm open to other possibilities.  What I would like to see is a shopping cart that integrates well with a full CMS.  In the past, I've found Joomla's Virtuemart extension and Drupal's e-Commerce module to fall just short of the client's needs so I've stuck with pure shopping carts such as osCommerce.  Yet, I still keep on hoping for better open source options.

A new shopping cart module for Drupal, Ubercart, is hot under development and attempts to address the short-comings of the Drupal e-Commerce module.  Ubercart's roots comes from people like you and me who wouldn't mind moving the client from osCommerce over to Drupal.  In fact, some of the user interface in Ubercart is very similar to that found in osCommerce (check screenshots), which is a good thing for clients to experience during a migration from one application to the next.  Ubercart is still under alpha development, but if you've followed osCommerce's long software development cycle the terms alpha, beta, and release candidate are not terms that will scare you off from taking a look at Ubercart.

So here I have a need to see a comparison of Drupal's e-Commerce module and Drupal's Ubercart module.  The Web gods smile on me and provide me Brenda Boggs' recent comparision of the two Drupal shopping carts, "Diving into Drupal E-Commerce: An Ubercart vs. E-commerce Comparison".

So, for all these reasons when an e-commerce site fell into my lap a couple months ago, I chose Ubercart.

Another project came my way shortly after which used a variation of modules that led me to believe e-Commerce was the way to go, plus I wanted to know how well it held up in comparison - so for that project, I chose e-Commerce.

Having worked with both in overlapping time frames these past few months, I've got a pretty good understanding on how each works, the differences between them, the pros and cons as I see them, and community behind them, yadda yadda.

As far as I know Brenda Boggs' post is the first independent comparison of the e-Commerce and Ubercart modules.  As a commenter at her site suggests, if you're using osCommerce and another flavor of osCommerce, such as ZenCart, Ubercart would be a good module for you to take a look.

Comments

#1 Have you had a look at

Barry Sampson's picture
Submitted by Barry Sampson (not verified) on September 27, 2007 - 11:19am.
Have you had a look at Magento? http://www.magentocommerce.com/

#2 Magento looks interesting

Bryan's picture
Submitted by Bryan on September 27, 2007 - 9:21pm.
Magento looks to be an interesting project with a nice clean interface. Looking at the forums it looks as if they're hoping Magento the first full version will be available in early 2008.  That's good timing for the project I have in mind.  I'll have to take a look at it in closer detail.  Thanks for the suggestion.

#3 initial personal impression magentoCommerce Drupal/uberChart

MantraS's picture
Submitted by MantraS (not verified) on October 1, 2007 - 3:06am.
initial personal impression of pros magentoCommerce over Drupal/uberChart (not a full comparison so no true fairness here :)

- better UI -both the http://www.magentocommerce.com/ and the default theme and theme dev method for customised themes
- purpose built for commerce
- marketing approach that it aimed to create impact and approacabilty starting from the very http://www.magentocommerce.com and compare to http://www.drupal.org or http://www.ubercart.org .

for website developers, not PHP or js skilled developers (not intimidating like Drupal for non PHP coder site developers), limited 'CMS' features with static pages limited expendiblity for other add-on modules t extend the website to other non commerce features

- requires certain amount of PHP skills
- else for any extra feature you will be presumed thart you are a PHP developer or nagged by other module developers to remind you :)

this comparison not reflect the Drupal or Uberchart devs great work

-imo check out the demos to compare http://livetest.ubercart.org http://www.magentocommerce.com/demo

#4 In my defense, I know our

Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan (not verified) on October 2, 2007 - 5:45am.

In my defense, I know our livetest sucks right now. ; ) I haven't bothered making it pretty the whole time we've been in Alpha, but I was planning on redoing it once we hit Alpha 8 and have most of our core features in place. Please check back once the ugliness is gone. : P

I think both Magento and Ubercart are looking for a low barrier to entry... I know using Drupal adds some intrinsic complexity, but we're working on the docs, community support, and user interfaces to make them simpler and more intuitive. But alas, we have plenty of room to grow. : )

#5 Thanks for the nod : )

Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan (not verified) on September 28, 2007 - 7:36am.
Thanks again for giving us some air time. I'm just about to pump out the Alpha 7d release (darn these minor versions) to fix an extraneous " in some HTML and roll out a fully configurable order status system. Ahh... no more hacking into osC files and running db queries just to add in an extra status. There are some other usability improvements as well, and hopefully Alpha 8 will be hot on its heels. (In Ubercart speak, that means 2-3 weeks down the road. ; ) Our roadmap from there will be beta and beyond. We're pushing for a 1.0 by the end of the year... because seriously, it's just time. : P

#6 osCommerce to UberCart

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on September 28, 2007 - 8:43am.
Will Ubercart have an import for osCommerce? One of the things that keeps me in osCommerce is not having the time to enter all of my products by hand a second time into another cart. Between by actual store and the new online customers, my mom and pop store is just too busy to not be able to just plop my database into another application.

#7 Migrating from osCommerce to Ubercart

Ryan's picture
Submitted by Ryan (not verified) on September 29, 2007 - 7:07pm.
Yep, we've been using our importer to build product catalogs in Ubercart sites based on our current catalog in an osCommerce site. It migrates everything, including categories and images. Because osC can be so hacked, I'm not sure that it will work out of the box for everyone... but that's the nature of the beast and reason we're leaving osC behind. ; ) In any event, customizing our osC export script (our importer works fine and is XML based with a community member working on a CSV based one) will be a lot less time consuming than creating your own from scratch. We've also got a basic order exporter/importer, but there again... everyone's storing different data and has different order statuses and all that. It will probably require at least a little customization.
Bryan's picture

About this CMS Enthusiast

Bryan Ruby is the owner and editor for CMS Report. He founded CMSReport.com in 2006 on the belief that information technologists, website owners, and web developers desired visiting sites where they could learn about content management systems without the sales pitch.

Outside of his late night blogging hours, he is the Information Technology Officer for a field office in the federal government. Away from the computer he enjoys his family, bicycling, camping, and the outdoors.