I'm a long-time E-commerce developer. Looking to switch to a new core product to customize for some clients with mid-size stores. We've carefully evaluating 20 of the most popular shopping carts. Our 4 finalists include ViArt, CS-Cart, Avactis, and PrestaShop.
 
Out of the 4, ViArt probably has the most features we require, although adding new ones is no problem for us. To be honest, we are a bit disappointed with the look of the front-end and back-end interfaces, the other packages have a more clean and professional layout on front and back ends, but I assume we can easily modify that. We'll want to hide some of the irrelevant Admin options such as Help Desk, etc. from the client to keep things simple and design our own front-end layout.
 
My main concern is that the software is very stable - meaning very few bugs, and nothing significant, and that there is good support - responses within 24 hours, bugs fixed or solutions provided quickly, and no security holes.
 
Compared to most of the other products, this forum is fairly sparse indicating to me the user base is a lot smaller, which is fine, but also maybe it indicates there isn't a lot of problems! ?
 
Can someone who has been working with this product, especially someone who has done custom modifications, give me the real honest scoop as to what I'm in for from a developer perspective should we choose this to be our "go to" core cart program to build sites off of? Especially be interested in how it compares to other products you've used, especially Avactis, CS-Cart, PrestaShop, CRELoaded, and CubeCart.
 
Thanks much! Look forward to potentially being another ViArt user.

I have 2,000 products and have a good flow of orders through the day and have never had any stability or other serious problem during the three years using it.
The product is stable.
 
Support is good and Viart works hard to resolve any issues and give help.
 
You can customize look and feel with templates. It is CMS driven which makes it easy for the user (like me) to work with on a daily basis.
 
Admin can be set to allow different users to have different levels of acces - easy. In my shop there are three departments each only able to access what is relevant to them.
 
Can't comment on modification - when I have wanted anything I get Viart to do it for me for a very reasonable fee. Others will comment upon this.
 
Hope this helps
 
Chris

I've been using ViArt for about 2 years. I love the support desk feature, and the interface always seems very nimble to me for the things I want to do. Every time I am tempted to look around I'm reminded of basic ViArt features like SO many different paths to initiate automatic emails per order or per product, their easy to search & change "system static messages", and many other features that other carts lack.
 
For me a real Achilles heel was that the manual was not up to date for awhile. (A lot of software companies seem to struggle with this) It is now up to date for V3.6, which really helps!
 
ViArt gave us a teaser of the new interface for V3.7 a few weeks back, and it looked stunning. Maybe you can find a link to some screen shots somewhere in this forum.
 
ViArt's support people have always been responsive and surprisingly kind even when people get testy with them. I've made perhaps 20 or 30 support requests, and their response has always resolved my problem.
 
I am excited to see the new version which hopefully will be out very soon.
 
Quite a few ViArt users have done mods themselves or had ViArt do mods for them (they are a bargain for those of us in USA). I think most people have had good results, but of course their is always the issue of needing to change the mod for new versions. I've done a bit of reverse engineering with success.
 
For developers like you, it would be handy to be able to "turn off" parts of admin. Consider contacting ViArt support for a cost estimate. You might be surprised. And then generally they will fold all mods into the next version.
 
Best wishes with your cart evaluations,
Greg
 
p.s. - I've spent a lot of time evaluating most of the carts you name and many others. There is certainly no perfect solution, but ViArt keeps winning my heart.

We have been using Viart on three domains with a lot of orders being processed.
 
We generally like Viart and below some points we found:
 
1. Changes are really easy as it is unencrypted php code.
2. Most payment processors do not work and need manual fixing (Worldpay, Moneybookers, Gate2Shop).
3. Viart has support for many processors, this is positive.
4. We were able to use this for our software sales (as it generates serial codes) as well as for our SAAS products with pre-paid models.
5. The front end UI can be customized and the backend is usable. Depending on the license type you buy some menus will disappear (e.g. forum).
6. Integration is possible but not easy. We recently migrated our websites to Wordpress (using it as CMS) and our Viart shops work fine in it.
7. If you want to really totally change the layout of the front end store you'll be facing some unique troubles as the front end is not following web standards.
8. We decided to use it for shop only. For the forum and help desk we use phpbb and Kayako because these are much more powerful.
9. Excellent mlti currency support. Can be used internationally with multi language support.
10. Affordable compared to the feature set.
11. Responsive and good support.
 
All in all, we are able to process very different business models with the same shop platform. We migrated to Viart from a simple script back in 2008. It was the only platform flexible enough to handle the different business modesl we have.
 
Since, we've not looked at others as we are happy with the system and have done so much customization on Viart that we are "locked in" .

Vic140 said "For developers like you, it would be handy to be able to "turn off" parts of admin."
 
If you create a new Group for System Administrators to be in you can edit the Admin sections you want them to see via"
Administration > System > Privilege Groups > Edit"
 
HTH

We have experimented with the software and tested it in a large scale (4000 SKU store with 3000 line item purchases per day).
 
Performance: Great. It's as fast as anything out there.
 
Stability: Great too. There are a few bugs but they are don't interfere with operations.
 
Customisation: Pre pare to invest a lot of time. UI is for both front and back end are antiquated and quite clumsy. The learning curve for new programmers and operators is big compared to other systems.
 
Backend: Complicated. It's OK for experienced tech staff, it's not something you can hand over to a client who has limited web expertise. My customers all love the front end, all gagged on the back end.
 
Support: OK, not not great. There have been times where weeks have gone by with no response. When they get to your problem they do a good job with the solution.
 
CMS, Forum and Help Desk: Useful but very basic. Use them to enhance the basic store, don't expect them to be susbtitutes for CMS, Forum or Help Desk software.
 
Documentation: Limited and generally outdated. There is no manual you can hand to an operator, you have to develop this if you expect an order clerk or product managers to manage orders and products.
 
Realistically this is a solution for small businesses with technical operators. It's not far off being an outstanding e-commerce solution -- a face lift, some documentation is rather limited so the learning curve is big for clients and developers.
 
As far as the company goes, it's hard to say whether there is a company behind this. Development takes place in the Ukraine (I think) by a loosly connected team. I don't think there are any full time staff, or an organized company behind this.

I've used Viart for nearly 3 years now. We've installed many copies for various clients doing various things. Store, CMS, etc. and nearly everyone has a mod of some kind. Very easy to work with. I do wish it had a plug-in platform because every upgrade is an issue.
 
I've also used CS-Cart and while it may look flashy, and is coded in very clean MVC style, it doesn't have the features of Viart and the CMS is a joke.
 
As far as the interface - slicker is not always better. We usually train our clients for 1 hour (2 if they have a store) and we rarely get questions from them after the first month. It's very intuitive for most people. Which means reduced support costs for us. Although, with all the new features added in 3.6, it can become frustrating to find things, frex: all the options for email notices. There are so many, it would be great if they were all in one place.
 
Only with the last 2 installs have I run into problems that either are not-fixable or taking a while to resolve:
1) in 3.6 they've added a way to figure out how much you can fit in a shipping package. For one of my clients, who sells baby and adult clothes, this is a big problem. She can fit more than 10 baby items in a box, but only a couple of adult items and she uses different sized boxes based on how big an order is. But the smallest number you can specify is 0.1, so no more than 10 items in a package. It's a big mess. Right now we've turned off automatic shipping calculation which isn't an ideal solution.
 
2) The advanced search has the capability to search options and specifications. But it turns out that it doesn't work for product type options and specs (just individual product options). Since specs are a product type thing, the spec search doesn't work at all and I haven't had good luck getting the custom filters to work with it either. I reported this as a bug and while Viart has always been very helpful, they see this as an added feature, which they are working on for free, but it's already taken over a month. Semantics. I may have to fix this one, myself.
 
Have fun!
/Wendy