Which ecommerce platform to pick?

[craigy]

My company is planning to develop a new ecommerce site. We are a computer/electronics products etailer. We have local retail stores as well. We are looking at oscommerce , zen cart, ofbiz, and magento . I am struggling to decide which one to pick. Regarding Magento, it apperas to have many good features, but I have heard people say that it is slow. OFbiz was suggested to me because it is supposedly much faster. However I don not know much about it, and I fear it may be too complex. One of my coworkers suggested OScommerce or Zen Cart, however I didn't like the sites I saw on their live site samples. However this may be just about the designer rather than the platform itself. I have heard that they are older platforms and not as capable.

Is there any definitive opinions on which is the best platform, or does it depend on my needs.

We have around 90k unique visitors a month, $40k/month in online sales, but only a small number of daily transactions(around 10-20). I think we get more visitors than or monthly sales would suggest because we have brick and mortar retail stores.

We are willing to invest money in a better platform if that means the site is more attractive, efficient, and gives a better user experience.

Does anyone have any suggestions or feedback for me? I appreciate any advice anyone can give

[afcredultra]

Hi,

Magento is powerful, very powerful, however yes it can be slow, and for optimal performance you may be required to tweak your server to handle it. If you're on a virtual host, then this may be out the window.

osCommerce - avoid. It's old and from my experience of it VERY buggy, though this may be down to many contributers adding to the project with poor code. This was popular in the early days of the internet, but not so much now.

Zen Cart is my ecommerce platform of choice. It is derived from osCommerce. It's community is lively and very willing to help. The developers are always working on it and have been working on version 2 (current 1.38a) for the last year or two. The new version will follow OOP programming methods rather than the current procedural method.

If you stick with modules that are contributed to the main Zen Cart website, you won't go far wrong. As far as I am aware, these are tested and approved before being made available through their own website, so you can more or less avoid dodgy add-ons.

I agree that many of the Zen Cart sites in their showcase are poor, very poor infact. You will notice alot follow the same style and have only changed the header image and some colours. To have your site included in the Zen Cart showcase it must have a credit link back to the ZC website. This may be why there is a lack of "good looking" websites in the showcase.

FWIW, there are many beautiful, functional ZC sites out there, though rarely are they showcased to the world as ZC sites. I include many of my own sites in that - I don't include a link back to the ZC website either, however I do donate to the project when I have spare cash!

ZC can do ALOT "out of the box" so as a general rule of thumb, the less you customize it (server side code) the less you are likely to come across problems. It can handle most things thrown at it. I've worked on one site with hundreds of products and about 100 orders per week and it's coped fantastically.

As with everything there is a bit of learning curve. It took me two or three projects to get my head fully round ZC but now I have, and have a good understanding of the file system and procedures, I realise the power and capabilities it offers.

Hope that's of help. Anything else send me a PM!

[optimalwebsite]

I agree Zen Cart - way steep learning curve... I'd recommend getting someone in that knows their stuff. I've put together a shop at Easy Runner - Bristols Biggest Running Shop - so you can get a nice looking website from the software.

[neonexus]

If your goals are to improve the user experience, increase online sales, improve search engine rankings (e.g. drive more traffic), etc. then I would strongly suggest taking a very in-depth look into Magento eCommerce.

I agree with above comments that OSCommerce is something to avoid as they have fallen behind regarding MySql 5, etc. Also, there are many other eCommerce packages that are rather difficult to learn with not as much to gain for the time spent.

[Emilyecho]

No perfect thing. Except oscommerce , zen cart, ofbiz, and magento,there are tons of good ecommerce platforms for small business. Whatever you choose, be sure it can be compatible with other ecommerce packages and hava a good customer sevice team.

[BanquetTables.Pro]

I love virtuemart

[craigy]

what do you guys think about aspdotnetstorefront vs Magento?

[wmrobwl]

I went through a very similar decision making process and the best way to decide is to actually try every viable option. Don't run it on a production site...try them out as a test with some dummy pages first.

I like Zen Cart, OS Commerce and Magento. Most of what everyone else said it pretty much accurate. You can't really judge any of the carts by their demos and sample sites because you can definitely make something better with their carts just by playing around for a bit.

[craigy]

I really do like Magento. However the only two concerns that I have are 1) the speed. Some of the sites I go on seem to be slow, and the back end seemed to be slow. and 2) Visa compliance

I really want to get an opinion on aspdotnetstorefront if anyone has ideas. I am really considering either of these two options. In my case, I don't mind much the license fee. I'm most concerned with which has better performance and features

[tdave]

These ecommerce platform always made me so confuse,anyway how about AgoraCart - Open Source ecommerce shopping cart .