Expand capabilities of your business through a shopping cart system.
CRE Loaded is a fast growing Commercial Open Source eCommerce application. With this application installed your site you can sell products, capture customer, and order info and publish company information in a feature-rich application. The latest release adds a large number of features, and reworks the administration menus for improved efficiency with new tabbed arrangements on the Catalog, Product Edit, Article Manager, and the new CRE Page Manager pages.
Has a lot of functionalty. Has subproducts. gift certificates, ability to make sales, realtime shipping quoites and store user data, etc
Cons
When something goes wrong you are basically on your own. When the post office changes a rate, if a field changes it is not updated for weeks and it just won't work. Because it is developed by many sharers. no one person knows enough to help you.
Summary
Beware this software is bad.
Be careful. High highs & Low lows
PowerClan3
Pros
The product can do a lot. Stores all data on customers, orders. and product changes are easy. <p>Templates (for a fee) are available to make it all look good also. The free version has a template that many use "as is" for a storefront with no template. It is ok.<p>You can purchase add-in mods that will do "anything conceivable" in my opinion. This includes automatic froogle feeds, my simon feeds, newsletters, SEO, etc. Many of these items are simply out of the realm of possibility for the average site because it is too time consuming and complex. Here it is not, but these mods all cost money.<p>In other words, the free version is the most versatile of many formats that I have used and give a lot of room to grow.
Cons
With that said, the product install is moderately daunting. It was many hours of looking at server settings, installing, changing settings, and checking to see if it worked. <p>Once It was kinda working, I installed a template monster free template. Never worked. 3 hours wasted. No help from anyone. I then bought a template from web site templates .biz. It worked perfectly. <p>The only real problem with the product is that it has almost zero free support and is fraught with issues. The forum for the product is the only free support. It normally has one person check it a day and they only respond to a few questions. Search google for cre loaded forum and you will see the free support forum. Look under installation and configuration. You will also see a page full of questions with just a few replies. You will see a page of people working night and day on a shoestring budget trying to get the product to work right. You will see them alone. Yes, this is where I am. <p>You can *pay* for support. If having trouble with the shopping cart import export, you can *pay* another $150 for a shopping cart mod. If you buy the mod and it doesn't install right for release number differences, you can *pay* for support. <p>In conclusion: <p>if you are a great programmer and/or can afford some mods and paid help, this product is *awesome* and the best thing since grits. It will require a little work, but it is great. <p>If you are on a shoestring budget, have minimal products, and are ok with the standard template look, Use it - or pay someone to install (about $30). <p>If you are on a shoestring budget, have a few product options that you need (or may need in the future), have a lot of products, and cannot to wait for free support, look elsewhere. The functionality of the product is not worth your hours and hours of work to find one small item that does not work. With support it would be answered in minutes, but it takes days and you not get an answer. Do this a few times and you are weeks into building something that should be simple