Service
OpenCart store: a catalogue that holds tens of thousands of items
The store has grown, and every small edit now reaches into a core someone patched long before you. Wholesale buyers and retail buyers see the same price. Updating a module is scary, because nobody knows what will break afterwards.
Straight talk
OpenCart or something else — it comes down to the catalogue
OpenCart fits when the store is the site: thousands or tens of thousands of items, deep category trees, attributes and filters, wholesale alongside retail, several languages and currencies. Cart, customer account, discounts, coupons, product comparison are already in the core, so there is nothing to assemble from plugins. Our largest OpenCart catalogue is the builders' market Budmen, with a stated 35,000 products and a separate tool rental section.
When another tool is better
If the project is built on content, a blog and landing pages, and the catalogue is small and secondary, the store is easier to keep inside WordPress: one admin panel for articles and products. If you need B2B logic with several warehouses, contract prices and EDI, or filtering across 50,000+ SKUs, that is headless or custom territory. Borderline cases we work through on a call, before any estimate.
What is included
Catalogue, wholesale, payment and delivery — in the base estimate
Catalogue, attributes, filters
- A category tree built around how your buyer searches, not around your warehouse structure. At Gdent the catalogue is arranged by clinical field (therapy, endodontics, prosthetics, surgery); at ForceUkraine it works by tool type and by car make at the same time.
- Product options and variants: size, colour, configuration, each with its own stock and price. Filters, size charts, wishlists and comparison. Product import from Excel or 1C using our template, because a catalogue of thousands of SKUs is not typed in by hand.
Wholesale, retail, dropshipping
- Two audiences in one store: a retail shopfront and a wholesale account with its own prices and terms. That is how ELVI, Larionoff (dropshipping there too) and the Sushi Product wholesale portal work, the latter with ingredient sets for a specific cuisine.
- Several language versions and several currencies. Ukrainian as the main one, Russian at /ru, English if needed, as at Sushi Product. Prices in hryvnia, euro and dollar, as at ELVI and Larionoff.
Payment, delivery, 1C exchange
- LiqPay, Privat24, monobank — card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, pay in parts and instalments. At RollerShop, pay in parts runs alongside cashback and trade-in of old skates.
- Nova Poshta: shipping cost calculation, branch selection, tracking in the customer account. Two-way exchange of stock and orders with 1C or a CRM: a sale on the site takes stock down, a delivery received adds it back to the catalogue.
Custom modules and speed
- Whatever the module marketplace does not have, we write ourselves. For Gadgik, a pickup point module with coordinates and opening hours, plus case matching across hundreds of phone models. For RainWay, a calculator that assembles a full guttering set by series, diameter and colour.
- A large catalogue is not slow in itself: caching, query and image optimisation, clean URLs for categories. At ForceUkraine, speed on a catalogue of over 3000 items is held by NitroPack.
- OpenCart
- ocStore
- PHP
- MySQL
- LiqPay
- Privat24
- monobank
- Нова Пошта
- 1С
Three scenarios
New store, version upgrade or rework — a process to match your project
- New store from scratch
We design the catalogue structure, build a custom theme, connect payment, delivery and 1C exchange. A starter store of up to 500 SKUs from $1900; the full scope with integrations and a wholesale account up to $7500. Launch takes 5-12 weeks depending on the catalogue.
You get: a live store, a guide for your content manager and 30 days of support.
- Version upgrade and move
A store on OpenCart 1.5 or 2.x that has not been updated in years, moved to a current branch: catalogue, orders, customer base, custom modules. Old URLs get 301 redirects, meta and structure are kept, because a move should not cost you rankings in Google.
You get: a store on a supported version, a redirect map and a testing report.
- Work on an existing OpenCart
A technical audit and a straight answer: what can be fixed and what is cheaper to rewrite. The usual picture is a bought theme, three dozen modules from different authors and edits made straight in the core, which is why the store will not update. We say that at the audit, not after the third invoice.
Cases
OpenCart stores that take orders every day
How we work
How we take an OpenCart store to its first payment
Brief and catalogue structure
30 minutes on Zoom: how many items, which attributes and filters, is there wholesale, how many languages and currencies, do you need 1C exchange. For a move, this step becomes an audit of the existing store. You get: catalogue structure, a list of integrations, a budget range and timings.
Design
Mockups of the product page with options, the catalogue with filters, the cart, checkout and customer account. Three rounds of edits are in the budget. You get: approved desktop and mobile mockups and a fixed price for the full scope.
Theme, modules, content
We build the theme for OpenCart, write custom modules for your process and load the catalogue by import in parallel. Weekly deploys to staging. You get: a store on staging with real products.
Integrations and testing
We connect LiqPay or monobank, Nova Poshta, 1C or a CRM. We check with live transactions: a real payment, tracking, a refund. You get: a signed testing report.
Launch and handover
Move to the live domain, redirects from old addresses, Google Search Console, GA4, Merchant Center, all before release day. We train your content manager to work with the catalogue. You get: a live store, a guide and 30 days of support.
Common questions
What people ask about OpenCart and moving
Let's talk
Describe your catalogue and we will price your OpenCart store
In detail
OpenCart development: what works out of the box and what has to be built
We pick OpenCart because of the type of task, not out of love for a particular CMS. It is an engine that does out of the box what other platforms sell as add-ons: multi-level categories, product options and attributes, several languages and currencies, customer groups with their own prices, coupons, customer accounts, comparison and wishlists. When the catalogue is the store's main asset, that saves both build budget and support time.
Projects on this platform rarely resemble one another. Budmen is a builders' market with tens of thousands of items and a separate tool rental section. RainWay is a guttering manufacturer where the buyer assembles a system with a calculator by series, diameter and colour. Gadgik sells phone accessories with matching across hundreds of device models and its own pickup point module with coordinates and opening hours. Sushi Product is a wholesale portal for a HoReCa supplier, with a buyer account and three languages.
The first thing we ask about is the version. OpenCart 4 rewrote the extension system: modules built for 3.x will not install on it, and some authors never ported their work. So a store on 3.0.3.x is not automatically outdated: if a working set of modules holds it together, moving costs more than supporting the current version. We cost both scenarios and show the numbers, rather than advising an upgrade just because a new version came out.
The second thing is speed on a large catalogue. Stock OpenCart is not built for tens of thousands of items with deep filtering: product and category queries start dragging the page down. The fix is indexes, caching and rewritten queries, and that is a line in the estimate, not something thrown in for free.
Half the enquiries we get are not "build us a new one" but "we have a store, but". Behind that is usually version 1.5 or 2.x, a bought theme, three dozen modules from different authors and edits made straight in the core. Such a store will not update: any update wipes the edits. So we start with an audit and say plainly which is cheaper, fixing it or moving to a clean build with the custom logic brought back as separate modules.
A word on moving and search. The store lives on organic traffic, so a map of old addresses and 301 redirects are part of the work, not an optional extra. We carry over category and product titles and descriptions, keep clean URLs, set up hreflang for the Ukrainian and Russian versions, and after release watch in Search Console how pages get reindexed. That is what we did at Gdent, where two language versions of a medical supplies catalogue had to stop competing with each other in search results.
If you are still choosing a platform, do not choose from a feature list: start with the catalogue and how people search it. Every store format we build is collected in the online stores section. All store formats →
When the store is part of a content site with a blog and landing pages, it is easier to keep everything in one WordPress admin. We build those too, page next door. WooCommerce stores →
A live store needs updates, backups and attention to security, which is a separate line of work. Tell us the task: in 30 minutes we will say what exactly is needed and roughly what it will cost. Website support →