Which eCommerce solution would you use?

[sterlingcomics]

I'm evaluating osCommerce, Magento, and Zen Cart.

 

Hosted or cloud-based PaaS offering?

 

osCommerce has been out there a while--possible technology issues with its age.

 

Magento is the recent up and comer, and they have a PaaS offering that's reasonable, but not since every product is a unique book, it can get expensive quick (they charge based on unique products).

 

None looks like they offer "Offer" type solutions. Plugins?

 

I have IT experience, so assume I can handle the PHP, database, installation, etc.

 

Any wisdom from those who have been there, done that.

[mschmidt]

Open Cart if you have PHP experience.

Spree if you have RoR experience.

 

osCommerce is buggy, slow, with tons of security issues and parses out awful html/css.

 

Magento is complicated to tweak, cumbersome and slow (unless you pay for the enterprise edition).

[sterlingcomics]

Open Cart if you have PHP experience.

Spree if you have RoR experience.

 

osCommerce is buggy, slow, with tons of security issues and parses out awful html/css.

 

Magento is complicated to tweak, cumbersome and slow (unless you pay for the enterprise edition).

I'm actually leaning to Magento, but there's very little documentation on how to tweak it. It's been garnering over 20% market share in just 4 years, which is hard to ignore. Many of the performance problems (I've heard) is due to not properly tweaking Apache and mySQL databases, and using shared infrastructure--I've also heard Rackspace is poor at Magento hosting and that there are some that specialize in that brand if need be. No way am I paying nutso money for Enterprise, really didn't see anything architecturally that different to justify it. I'll be a small shop for sure.

 

Agreed on osCommerce--although my understanding is that many of them were also part of the underlying software revisions.

 

I'm frankly a good IT generalist, never got into web development hard core, but after learning a dozen languages (I've spent 5+ years development) or so and having good infrastructure experience (last 20 years being a solutions integration consultant) I think I can come to whatever bridge I need to cross when I get there.

 

Haven't heard of Spree, I'll check out Open Cart.

[sterlingcomics]

Open Cart looks pretty good! Bump in case any more thoughts out there...

[eriqui]

magento is actually fairly easy to use in terms of the basics and if you really learn the ins and outs can be an extremely powerful tool. A lot of major companies use it. I also really like the idea of shopify.com which simplifies the ecommerce experience even more.

[VintageComics]

I went with Magento for several reasons.

 

It is a bit cumbersome initially but it's strength is it's ability to be flexible and grow from a small "mom and pop" shop to an enterprise level platform with relative ease. It's extremely versatile.

 

eBay has purchased Magento (I had an inkling of this going in which helped sway my decision) and so it should also make interfacing between the two easier as that was one of the projects I've been waiting on.

 

Magento is the big new thing right now. Not sure what's on the horizon.

 

[zuckuss2003]

Roy, are you using community edition? Did you work with a developer to set up the instance and database?

[VintageComics]

Roy, are you using community edition? Did you work with a developer to set up the instance and database?

 

I worked with a developer. Don't ask me any techie stuff. I told them what I wanted and they made it happen. That's the extent of my knowledge.

 

Still working on it actually, was just waiting for the con season to end.

 

 

[zuckuss2003]

Got it, thanks. Looking forward to see it completed.

[sterlingcomics]

No idea eBay bought Magento...kinda puts a bad taste in my mouth there in terms of enhancements that benefit folks who want to do their own sites. They will more or less try to get the developments to enhance eBay...well folks who want to do their own sites want to stay the hell away from eBay.

 

It's like Oracle buying mySQL when they have, well ORACLE.

 

I'm currently seeing much more development vigor and help from opencart, plus it's snazzy fast. I'm sure under the covers there could be an ugly wart or two from an architecture standpoint. Haven't made much progress otherwise. Need to get hopping.

[Passport Comics]

My own site uses Opencart, love it. Simple, powerful, and lots of support and modules. Still tweaking mine, but far easier to deal with than magento, which was cumbersome and a pain to work with, IMHO.