Perl e-commerce?

[James Laver]

On 14 Sep 2011, at 12:26, Peter Edwards wrote:

> I'll echo what James says here.
> For a free software cart frontend use a PHP cart like ZenCart and
> OSCommerce, the Perl solutions aren't fully featured enough IME.

ZenCart is a fork of OSCommerce that does not fix the horrible security holes. Don't use either of these.

> Or pay for
> a commercial one:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software

Last I checked, cubecart wasn't too bad.

> Another whole fun ballgame is choosing the payment processor for the
> checkout backend. The UK government has a comparison website for
> pricing/features but these two used to be okay
> http://www.2checkout.com/
> http://www.authorize.net/
> Make sure the cart you want to use has a gateway plugin for the payment
> processor you want to use.
> I wouldn't use Google Checkout. Paypal is expensive but convenient for some
> customers and you made need it as an additional payment option to avoid
> losing sales.

On payment processors, I've always found sagepay (formerly ProtX) an absolute joy to deal with. they support via phone or email or twitter (and hell yes, they've been very helpful over that medium).

Can't recommend them highly enough. If you want utter reliability though, you've got to start looking at spending a lot of money, and for the small downtime you get with less-enterprise-focused payment providers, it isn't worth it.

/j