Recently I had the opportunity to work on a decent sized e-commerce project based on OpenCart. I haven’t used it before but I had heard its a very simple and easy to use. So the following is just a quick overview of all the fundamental flaws and issues with OpenCart and why you should NEVER use it as a platform of choice for your projects, unless you want constant headaches, ugly code and incredible amount of code repetition.
The obvious
So lets start with the obvious… A quick peak at the installation sql schema reveals something mind-boggling. The engine of choice for ALL tables, including orders is MyIsam, which first of all shouldn’t even be a consideration in any MySql 5+ setup really, especially for web purposes and second and more important maybe IT DOEST SUPPORT TRANSACTIONS. Simple logic dictates that transactions are a fundamental part of e-commerce, but apparently the team behind OpenCart decided thats not that case!? I am already stunned but lets not stop here… MyIsam doesn’t support foreign keys either, so all integrity and constraint checks are done with PHP, nasty…
Creating an online shop is as easy as A, B, C with the availability of so many open-source e-commerce platforms. In less than five minutes, you can create your very own online storefront like Amazon and offer physical and digital products for sale.
OpenCart is a robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants giving them the ability to create their own online presence and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.
In this two-part series I’ll explain all of the necessary steps to create your own e-commerce site with OpenCart. In this article I’ll start with its installation.
OpenCart Features
OpenCart is a powerful, open source shopping cart system that is designed to be feature rich and user friendly. Some of its features worth checking out include:
Open Source
The best thing about OpenCart is that it is free to download and use. There is no need for you to worry about licensing cost for using it. And if you ever make modifications to the OpenCart source code, you can share them back with the OpenCart developers so the community at large can benefit from them too.
Unlimited Categories/Products/Manufacturers
In an online store one would need to have unlimited Categories, products and manufacturers. In OpenCart you can create unlimited number of Categories for your products, add unlimited number of products to your store and add unlimited number of manufacturers.
Guest Shopping/Checkout
There are times you want to order a product online on an online store and don’t want to register before you can buy any goods. OpenCart allows guest shopping and checkout which enables a customer to add goods to their shopping cart, pay for the goods and checkout without them registering.
To learn more about OpenCart, be sure to visit their website at opencart.com.


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