I'm looking to implement a very basic shopping cart. Satchmo seems to install a lot of applications and extra stuff that I don't need. I've heard others mention django-cart. Has anyone tried this Django app (django-cart)? Anything to watch for or any other experiences?
Well if you want to use django-cart you should view it as a starting point for developing your own. The last commit (r4) for the project was November 2006.
By comparison, the last commit (r1922) to Satchmo was a couple of hours ago.
With Satchmo you get code that is under active development and actually used by real e-commerce sites.
If you develop your own you're running the risk of alienating customers and losing money. If you use Satchmo you can spend more time developing/improving other areas of your site.
I bet you can already guess my recommendation :)
As for the apps and other stuff in Satchmo I can tell you, from personal experience, that you don't need to include them all in your INSTALLED_APPS setting. I don't remember exactly what I pared it down to, but there were only around 6-7 Satchmo apps in my INSTALLED_APPS and they were all ones I needed. I think they've done even more modularization since then.