10 replies to this topic

[GoTTi]

one of the customers i have that i am building a store for has seen opencart in action and wants me to build that for them. i am not familiar at all with opencart. so this weekend i downloaded it and ran through it and i gotta say its very nice, but i am a osc kinda guy.

thing i dont dig with the opencart is that alot of their mods that i use here are paid for mods and addons...for like $80 or more on some of them. i think that is insane.

but i did like the cart right out of the box. the carousel, the rotating banners. it is very complicated though...it felt like. to do things with it you have to go with a lot more clicks and browsing around. and the system is all .tpl file based it looks like.

anyone else here ever used opencart? whats your thoughts on it.

[DunWeb]

@GoTTi

Quote

one of the customers i have......

JMO, you should NOT be offering professional services as you lack experience and really don't know much about PHP.  You have more than 400 posts asking for help from the members here so that you can charge your clients to do thier websites.  If I was your client found out that you are offering me a product that you really have no idea how to provide, I would be offended.


I suggest that you take a year or two and learn osCommerce AND PHP, SQL and Jquery and THEN offer limited services until you have the right experience to provide services.



Chris

[GoTTi]

DunWeb, on 30 April 2012 - 05:00 PM, said:

@GoTTi



JMO, you should NOT be offering professional services as you lack experience and really don't know much about PHP.  You have more than 400 posts asking for help from the members here so that you can charge your clients to do thier websites.  If I was your client found out that you are offering me a product that you really have no idea how to provide, I would be offended.


I suggest that you take a year or two and learn osCommerce AND PHP, SQL and Jquery and THEN offer limited services until you have the right experience to provide services.



Chris

i never said i charge them

[14steve14]

GoTTi, on 30 April 2012 - 05:04 PM, said:

i never said i charge them

If you dont charge them they are not customers.

[burt]

GoTTi, on 30 April 2012 - 04:53 PM, said:

thing i dont dig with the opencart is that alot of their mods that i use here are paid for mods and addons...for like $80 or more on some of them. i think that is insane.

Anyone who values their business, would see this as an investment and not a cost.

So many misguided people who think GPL = FREE && FREE == NO_COST.  

[MrPhil]

Regardless of the semantics of whether helping someone for free means they're a "customer"... although I agree that it would be of questionable ethics to charge someone for work if you are constantly having to run to the support forum to get basic information. As long as the "customer" understands that you are in learning mode, and thus not charging, that sounds OK to me.

Ask your customer why they like the other cart better. Is it just more eye candy? Point out that they're going to have to pay quite a bit to get the same features (add-ons) they get for free with osC. Show that you can deliver as much eye candy as OC for no charge, and maybe they'll change their mind. If it's substantive features that OC has and osC doesn't (even with add-ons), and you can't get the same results in some way, that could be an argument for OC. However, I doubt they have anything that osC doesn't have available.

Show them osC sites you've done, as well as other osC sites, and see if they aren't happy with the feature list.

[burt]

GoTTi, on 30 April 2012 - 05:04 PM, said:

i never said i charge them

You're doing it for free?  If that is the case, then the words of @DunWeb ring clearer and truer - you are taking potential customers away from developers who already spent years learning a raft of programming languages.

Having said that, I completely understand that the type of client who wants a freebie from you, would not pay a proper rate anyway.  So good luck to you.

[GoTTi]

so back on topic, has anyone else here used opencart?

[DunWeb]

@GoTTi

I suggest you refer to the opencart support forum for information on it.



Chris

[GoTTi]

MrPhil, on 30 April 2012 - 05:43 PM, said:

Regardless of the semantics of whether helping someone for free means they're a "customer"... although I agree that it would be of questionable ethics to charge someone for work if you are constantly having to run to the support forum to get basic information. As long as the "customer" understands that you are in learning mode, and thus not charging, that sounds OK to me.

Ask your customer why they like the other cart better. Is it just more eye candy? Point out that they're going to have to pay quite a bit to get the same features (add-ons) they get for free with osC. Show that you can deliver as much eye candy as OC for no charge, and maybe they'll change their mind. If it's substantive features that OC has and osC doesn't (even with add-ons), and you can't get the same results in some way, that could be an argument for OC. However, I doubt they have anything that osC doesn't have available.

Show them osC sites you've done, as well as other osC sites, and see if they aren't happy with the feature list.

this 1 customer/person/human being that wants me to do their store for them has a agreement with me. its not about money. im doing the work on the fly.

i have shown them several stores ive built from right out of the zip file with osc and today the guy saw opencart and liked the demo of it and the way the entire store operated. so i have been looking at the thing for a few hours now and i see a lot of work ive done on their store now going over to OC it looks like and im not happy about that, but if they want it what can i do....

the price of the mods is not a issue either for them. they dont care about the price. i just find some of their prices for addons that are here for free over there for $80 or $30 or $15 when there is a good chance some developer there is taking the ones here and just porting them over for their own financial gain...i dunno. but if its not needed then its not needed. i am a supporter of many mods and addons and have paid money to developers for mods on osc and help me with my stores. but today, i am re-learning my stuff for this since i was not doing for about 6 years almost. you kinda forget what you had done in that time on stores since

[GemRock]

i have a humble 2000ish posts on the forums but none of them are asking for help let alone those very basic quetsions that would give people the mistaken impression that one is purely a shop owner. and its been the consensus here (if not the rule) that the forums/server space are devoted to osCommerce and osCommerce ONLY. no one should discuss any other 'cart' here. Full Stop.

Ken