Initially I planned to write these mostly with my own PHP plus a small open-source PHP tool for a shopping cart. However, almost by chance, I stumbled across PHP OpenCart. I was very fortunate to discover this great piece of kit. It is fantastic for the small and medium site which wants to present and sell products. I managed to get both sites built with very little bother in about six or seven working days.

Out of the box, OpenCart has a reasonable array of options without making life very complicated. It has a decent basic template system which you can get your head around very quickly: maybe it doesn’t offer lots of bells and whistles but equally it doesn’t need a lot of referral to handfuls of files before you can get anything working. You can show boxes for product choices by brand, manufacturer, best sellers and featured items. You can organise discounts based on bands of order totals, free shipping when the total is over a certain value, and coupons for selective discounts. I have made a few PHP customisations but nothing radical was needed.

I also found a cheap OpenCart add-on which provided a DPS Payment Express module, which worked perfectly.

I’ll be happy to build more sites using OpenCart.

I have also configured Google Ads for these sites.