There are certainly some positive things that can be said about CubeCart, a low-end budget entry choice for an e-commerce platform. It’s certainly capable of doing the rudimentary functions it’s supposed to do: lets you add products into categories and lets customers look at them (even buy some!). It also supports a number of popular payment gateways / merchant accounts. Not rocket science.

My gripe with it starts at the price tag: $179.95. You don’t get a lot for your money that you can’t get for free elsewhere (eg OS Commerce, Magento, BossCart JV, VirtueMart, Mambo… to name but a few). In fact, you get nothing.

Irregardless, let’s assume–you are a self styled web 2.0 start-up that wants a piece of the pie, but with limited or no technical knowledge, scant time and resources. And a tight budget (those VC must be sleeping). You have splashed cash on cubeCart and have spent considerable time skinning the shop and populating it with your product range. It’s time to look at the business logic behind your shopping process, the SEO, the landing pages, the sizing and shipping options… And to discover that most of these trivial functions are available as paid-for (as in, you have to pay afresh) ‘community’ add-ons. Should you decide to display products based on brand/manufacturer, that’s also a commercial add-on. You get the picture? It’s a scam. By this time you’re well over your budget and behind schedule so you figure, stopping now means it’s all gone to waste. But perhaps you should, because CubeCart is certainly full of nasty surprises. Read on…

I had the dubious “pleasure” of supporting and improving a CubeCart 4.2.0 shop. Having had to implement and skin a ton of buggy or not totally adequate plugins that were purchased, I discovered another negative side to all of this: the CubeCart modders tend to base64 encode all of their work. That’s right, you can get shipping by country and you can pay for it but by god, you can’t change it. Which would have been ok if any of those fine developers actually had a clue and understood how an e-commerce business operates. Experience has taught me one thing: e-commerce is not what about what a programmer thinks it should be. you don’t just measure the strength of your platform by the number of product attributes or skins you can apply. It is also about making the shop owner’s job as easy and as organised as possible. What does that mean?

For instance… viewing orders into the main admin window or even as popups into a new window is cumbersome and difficult to do especially if you get more than, er… 1 a day. Imagine 40 orders waiting to be shipped, your couriers arriving in 30 mins, your phone ringing off-the-hook, new orders coming in, RMAs arriving and replacements needing to going out… and how do you manage this? Certainly not by looking at the CubeCart orders list, unless you have the memory of an elephant and can remember the contents of each order just by glancing at its order ID or customer name. Of course, you can just click into an order and then see the items contained within, go to your warehouse, find the item, pack it, get back to the PC, print the invoice, login to your couriers’ site, print the label, affix label to box and set aside for pickup. 39 more to go, go back to the orders screen and see if you remember where you were…

Nevermind, all of this can be fixed eventually by a consultant like myself a process that makes the original prudent investment of $179.95 seem like a very pleasant memory indeed! But the problems do not stop there… For example, after a while of the store being operational, the shop owners are bound to notice certain… trends. Like, why do people phone in and report that somewhere between clicking add to basket and going to checkout screen, their basket gets lost (something also reported on the forums). Intermittently. As you fix this sessions PHP error, you think… we’re ready for the big time, everything is sorted… Wrong again. CubeCart has more surprises in-store for you (great pun, if i say so myself). Over time, the speed of display of your product pages starts to increase. A lot…

Now, I use 24mb ADSL by be.there in London – pretty fast. I used to get the whole page (with all images) for something like 0.8 – 1.3 secs. Imagine my surprise when the delay between a link click and the start of page rendition (the ‘waiting for response’ phase) was over 4 seconds on its own! With nothing else changed to the best of my knowledge, my first reaction was to look at the MySQL database. I scanned it, profiled it, analysed it – to no avail. Deleted various search histories and session data entries, added some indexes… still nothing. Upgraded the MySQL version to 5.0.58 – no change (other than Fedora Core’s YUM removing Zend and MySQL support out of php.ini and Plesk refusing to work and pop3 passwords being rejected). Once I managed to fix all of that and turned by attentions back onto the website, the evidence still sides with my original suspicion: a database-related delay. It was time to do some query profiling… I found and modified the CubeCart DB class and added a timer and an echo wrapper around all mysql_query() calls. And there it was, waiting for me at the bottom of the page:

SELECT DISTINCT O.productId, I.name, I.image, I.price, I.sale_price FROM CubeCart_order_inv AS O, CubeCart_inventory AS I 
WHERE I.productId = O.productId AND O.cart_order_id IN 
(SELECT DISTINCT cart_order_id FROM CubeCart_order_inv WHERE productId = 274) 
AND O.productId <> 274 LIMIT 3

3 rows in set (3.74 sec). Nice. Nicer still… site does not even use the ‘customers who bought this also bought’ feature! What’s happened? Well, over the last 6 months, the orders and orders inventory tables have grown to something over 2500 records – which has caused this nasty nested query that returns 3 measly product IDs (that may not even be relevant for an up-sell here) to bomb the server.

This begs the question: haven’t the CubeCart development crew done any testing on their system? Or hasn’t anyone that’s used CubeCart before gotten to 2000+ orders? Small wonder…

How many more red herrings are there waiting to be discovered in CubeCart, we’ll never know. Just a word of advice: do not pick this for your platform, even if given half a choice!