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We ran a shop on OpenCart for years.

Talk to us What moving involves

This is not a comparison written from a feature matrix. Aimer traded on OpenCart, in Casablanca, with cash-on-delivery orders and Arabic and French customers.

Most of what Agora treats as a setting is something we paid a developer for on OpenCart.

First, honestly

What OpenCart does well.

Ownership

  • Self-hosted and yours
  • No per-order fee
  • Runs on modest hosting
  • Open source

Capability

  • Multi-store built in
  • Multi-currency and multi-language
  • A genuinely large extension library
  • Straightforward to host

Cost

  • The software is free
  • Cheap to run at small scale
  • Widely known by developers in our markets
  • Easy to find someone to work on it

What it cost us

Four things we paid a developer for, repeatedly.

  1. 01

    Every price rule

    A wholesale list, a seasonal discount, a per-customer price. Each one a small job, each one waiting on somebody else’s week.

  2. 02

    Every layout change

    Moving reviews above the description is a template edit. Multiply by four seasons and two languages.

  3. 03

    Arabic that never quite mirrored

    Because the themes were written with physical CSS properties. We know exactly how much work that is to undo — we are doing it now, on our own themes.

  4. 04

    Cash on delivery, entirely by hand

    Somebody calling six customers every morning before the van left. That is the origin of the confirm run in Agora.

The migration

1

of the ones we have done the most times.

Products, options, images, categories, customers and order history come across. We have moved OpenCart shops including our own, which means we know where it goes wrong — the option and variant mapping is the part that needs care.

"Most of what Agora treats as a setting is something we paid a developer for on OpenCart." The whole comparison, in one line

Which also means we are biased. Read /migrate, and ask us the question we answer honestly: whether you should move yet.

Next step

Ask us about the parts that worry you.

We have hit most of them ourselves. Tell us what your OpenCart setup does that you are afraid of losing, and we will tell you plainly whether it survives the move.

Talk to us What moving involves
We ran on it
For years, in production
Migration
One we have done many times
The tricky part
Option and variant mapping