Is it worth switching to OpenCart from PHPShop?

Question

CMS

Hello!
I am currently rebranding, reorganizing the store and moving to a new location, as well as developing a new website, after which we plan to invest in its promotion. At the moment there is a site made on the knee on the PHPShop Enterprise bought in puffs. However, it turned out that he does not suit me at all because of the difficulty in finding a specialist who could develop additional modules for him, correct something, etc. And the amounts that are asked for solving small problems are a little scary. What can I say, even finding a layout designer who could competently make up a design for him turned out to be an unrealistic problem.
In the light of these events, I shoveled a lot of paid and free products and sort of settled on OpenCart, which satisfies many of my requirements and, first of all, a fairly developed community, ease of finding a developer, a lot of ready-made inexpensive modules. However, it just so happened that I am somewhat distrustful of free products and I would like to ask:
Is it really possible to build a serious project on Open Cart?
What problems can you face at first?
What are the sizes of attachments to fix the main problems of this CMS?
Are my fears that a free product might cause too many problems justified?
There is a MaxyStore project based on OpenCart - maybe it's worth looking in its direction or there is no point?
What other CMS should I pay attention to, given my requirements?
Thank you!

Answer 1

In general, as far as I can see from my experience (I “moved” sites from Bitrix, WebAsyst and Shop-Script), moving to Opencart can cost about 17-20 thousand (migration of categories/products/manufacturers/attributes/options, creation/ template migration).
The engine itself is generally cool, although it still uses mysql functions. I recently tried to make a pull request that normally organized PDO support with backwards compatibility, but Daniel literally sent me to hell (even if several people supported me), and now I'm somewhat disappointed in this engine, although for a whole year I worked only with him - climbed far and wide, made a bunch of architectural improvements for clients, wrote modules.
Sorry for the lyrical digression - I still can’t find anyone to cry in the vest. :)
Yes, it is quite possible to build a serious store on Opencart. It has a big plus in that modules for it can be written very easily and quickly. Even, in principle, a novice programmer can handle it. And there are a lot of people who are finalizing / writing something. A lot of things can be found on opencartforum.ru .
At first, you may encounter the fact that it will slow down on a large number of products and categories. It tries all the time to count the number of products in each category, even if it is disabled in the settings. More than a year ago, an edit was accepted into the official repository that fixes this moment, but for some reason this edit did not get into the latest versions, as I see it (both in v1.5.6 and v1.5.6.1 this flaw is still present ). If this moment is corrected, the speed is amazingly increased. I once managed to earn $ 150 at this moment - in a couple of minutes of work. There are only two small edits that need to be made.
Otherwise, the engine no longer delivers particularly unpleasant surprises.
$150 was a stroke of luck. In general, the price of such an edit is about 500 rubles, but you can certainly find it cheaper on specialized resources. In MaxyStore, it seems that this point has been fixed in general. So it will work quite normally out of the box, and you won’t have to fix any major problems at all.
Product to product is different. Opencart itself will not bring you especially many problems. But additional modules can bring problems. Opencart has a pretty low entry threshold, so the quality of the code can be terrible. One module can cleanly kill all the jQuery on the page. Another will make it so that you don't get product reviews. The third one (from some French developer who loves to make navigation modules) will pull the database for each fart, generating 86 additional queries to the database on one page. In general, in the situation with Opencart, it is better to constantly work with the same programmer, who will install and modify modules and fix errors, etc. There will be less trouble, because on Russian-language resources to ask,
Try to look in the direction of ocStore from the site opencartforum.ru. I think he's a little better. From a developer's perspective, I personally don't like MaxyStore. I cannot clearly describe the reasons, but in a situation where there is a choice between MaxyStore and Opencart, I will definitely choose Opencart.
Assemblies such as MaxyStore and ocStore have the advantage of integrating many useful modules.
Minuses. They often lag behind in versions by 1-2 releases. For example, some newest ***Store might be based on a version of Opencart that was released over a year ago.
Quite often, the tweaks that build developers add to the kernel slow down the engine. As I see it (maybe I'm wrong), the developers of Opencart-based engines pay more attention to appearance, rather than architectural issues that will improve speed or security. And if they start to deal with architectural issues, then the engine partially loses compatibility with modules written for the original Opencart.
In general, after my pull request was rejected, I decided not to deal with Opencart at all (I'm so sensitive here) and switch to development for Magento. Of all the engines I've heard of (or touched), this one is my favorite. Although, in general, I didn’t feel so many engines.

Answer 2

My purely personal opinion:
If the online store is small (a couple of categories, no more than 100 products), then you can use OpenCart. But if there are a lot of products and categories, then you should look towards prestashop or magento.
Seriously, I don't know much about phpshop. somehow pulled it off to a local server, turned it around and forgot, since they were too smart in those places where it was not needed. (But again, this is just my personal opinion.)

Answer 3

If you are suspicious of a free product, look towards paid ones - themeforest.net/category/ecommerce/opencart - OC templates, codecanyon.net/category/plugins/opencart - plugins. All with support from the authors.