My current shop is from 2007 so it is a little bit old now. I'm interested about Opencart cart but I think there are so many "things" missing so I was wondering what kind of new features will 2.0 bring in or is everything just "cosmetic" changes.
List from
http://moz.com/blog/holygrail-of-ecomme ... hecklist#1
Some
basic things from that list I would like to see in core installation:
Use Qualaroo to Survey Visitors
Enable Olark for Direct Chat Interactions
Survey your Existing Customers
Show your Top-Selling Products on your Home Page
Offer More Ways to Order from your Store
Show videos on your home page (below the fold)
Localize your store to specific countries
Avoid vague category structures
Sort category structure by popularity
Use CrazyEgg to create focused category navigation
Implement an Intelligent search to cover singular, plurals, mis-spells etc.
Implement Auto-Suggestions to help user search for relevant keywords
Enable Category Search
Let the user know what they searched
Empower visitors with creative calculators
Clearly show the Product’s delivery time
Allow them to select delivery date
Enable Out Of Stock Notification
Encourage users to leave reviews
Offer Persistent Shopping Cart
Don’t make users enter the same information twice
Pre-fill information where ever you can
Preserve Information on a validation error
Clearly mark the fields as optional or mandatory
Give input example against each field
Offer a unified single ‘Name’ field
Automatically pre-fill city & state field as soon as user enters a zip code
Keep the form field labels visible at all times
Keep the form linear
Form field length should match the expected length of the input
Use FaceBook Connect
Display validation errors in close proximity to the input field
Display validation checks against each field
Make 'Account Registration' an Optional Step of Checkout Process
Don’t complicate Password Selection
Make the ‘Guest Checkout’ option more prominent than Registration
Make your primary button most prominent among rest all call to actions
Avoid unnecessary buttons on the checkout page
Primary button placement
Limit the navigation and exit points on the checkout page
Use Intelligent defaults
Let users force-proceed on potentially wrong validation
Process steps should function as navigational links for the checkout process
During registration, make the Newsletter sign-up an opt-in by default, not opt-out.
Enable Open graphs
Optimize the thank you messages on your store
Make user friendly 404 Error Page
No Results Found (Product / Page)
Validation Error Messages
Show Social Media Proofs
Leverage browser caching
Defer parsing of JavaScript
Optimize images
Serve scaled images
Combine images into CSS sprites
Minimize redirects
Enable compression
Minify JavaScript
Minimize request size
From my own list:
Twitter cards
XML sitemap
One step checkout
Meta tags
Bulk handling for orders
Google analytics
proper reference number for SEPA payments
import and export for products from csv or xls or xlsx
bulk updates for product quantities based on products codes.
Ajax live search
There are lot's more and some might find these unnecessary but only few of these are already in Opencart?
Or should I just install 1.5.6 and add 30, 40 or 50 different extensions and modifications and try to tweak every one of them to work together?
Sorry if asking the wrong questions..