Criteria For Shopping Cart Software : Shopping Cart Security - WebCart vs. osCommerce
In my pervious post I discussed the importance of technical support when it comes to the installation of shopping cart software. In this post I will discuss the issue of security, and how it relates to osCommerce vs. WebCart.
Shopping Cart Security:
The issue with osCommerce
The criteria for shopping cart software ought to include the ability to provide top notch security for online stores. The concern with open source software is its source code, (which in simple terms means the “soul” or “brain” of a program) is available to anyone who requests it. This seemingly innocent source code gives hackers and those who wish harm on your eCommerce store, an added opportunity to hack your site. Obviously the developers of osCommerce plug holes as they become known, however, the holes are usually plugged after the damage has already been done. Often times leaving eCommerce merchants the heartbreaking task of picking up the pieces.
The difference with WebCart
WebCart’s shopping cart software is built with PHP (which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor) the same language that osCommerce uses to built its software. However, unlink osCommerce WebCart is not open source, which means that less then a handful of developers have access to its source code. For the online store owner, this means hackers are far less likely to exploit any vulnerabilities with in WebCart’s shopping cart software. No piece of software is 100% safe, but what do exist are software solutions that are safer then others. An easy to understand example of this is OS X tiger vs, Windows XP, with the latter being less secure. In order to add an additional layer of protection, the developers of WebCart hired previous hackers (who have now changed their ways) to examine and find holes in our shopping cart software. After 3 weeks our developers plugged every whole identified by the x hacking team.
In the next post I will discuss custom functionality in both osCommerce and WebCart.
