ViArt Shop Free Shopping Cart Editor's Review

ViArt Shop Free Shopping Cart is a PHP e-commerce solution, designed to suit the needs of a small vendor. There are some limitations in this version. On the publisher's website you can also find some commercial versions of this portal, which support more than 10 categories, and more than 50 products.

Although the name might make you think that the script is just for implementing a shopping cart, ViArt Shop Free Shopping Cart has much more features that make it a complete shopping portal. The webmaster has access to an administration module for the website which includes a CMS (content management system), a help & support system, discounts mechanism, order maintenance, payment processing options and many more.

If you were thinking of publishing advertisments along with your website you should know that only 100 Ads and 10 Ads categories can be defined using the free version. However, this number should be enough if your site is not very big. A very nice thing is that if you decide to buy a paid version of this e-commerce portal, the publisher can help you upgrade (for a fee of $100), and your current products will not be affected.

The site is based on templates, so you can easily modify the layout of your webpages. It comes with 3 predefined skins, and you can choose any of them during the install process. In order to make the site work, your web server should have Zend Optimizer 2.1.0 or higher installed.

Pluses: As of version 2.0 ViArt Shop supports "Downloadable products", meaning that the end-user can purchase software, or any other product that can be downloaded. This kind of products can be downloaded directly from the ViArt Shop website after the user pays for them.

Drawbacks / flaws: When you click on a category that hasn't got any products, but has some subcategories, no product is shown. I would have liked to see some products from the subcategories there.

In conclusion: ViArt Shop Free Shopping Cart is intended for people or small companies, that want a website for selling a couple of products.

version reviewed: 2.7.1