I’m in the process of creating an online shop for Computer Aid.

I’m looking at selling software and at some point, also selling hardware.

Hostgator gives me a very large choice of online shop software.

Lets see, I can choose:

• os commerce
• prestashop
• zen cart
• cubecart
• opencart
• magento
• tomatocart
• phpcoin

After reading some reviews, it seems that Prestashop V1.3.1 is the easiest to setup.

At this stage, I don’t want to waste time evaluating 8 different shop apps.

I make a big assumption: most shop apps have similar features & they are all stable… its just the user interfaces that will be different (with some being more complex than others).

Boy was I wrong!

After spending some time setting up Prestashop (change currency to Australian Dollar, upload my logo, etc), I create a “product” to sell: I upload the “Complete Keyfinder” file that I currently have for sale in my software section, setup a price, setup some payment options, then do a test purchase.

Everything goes well until I try downloading CompleteKeyfinder…

I get prompted to download it as a text file… I proceed with the download, and I end up with a file called “CompleteKeyfinder.txt”.

By renaming it to CompleteKeyfinder.exe, I find it works normally, but its not what a customer would want.

I try a few variations, and find that this problem only happens with Firefox, and only with .exe files.

I try a different online shop, and there is no problem downloading .exe files.

So it looks like a fault with PrestaShop, and no short-term solution, without modifying php files.

I’m not interested in customising an unfamiliar application… I’d much prefer to install something that works without having to jump through hoops.

So the next shop software that I’ll be trying is: Tomatocart. Its based on the very popular OS Commerce, so it should be a lot more stable.

To be continued…