Whats your favourite ecommerce solution?

[nikkyn]

I would recommend VevoCart free shopping cart to anyone who wants to start an ecommerce.

[robertflorish]

I prefer zeuscart which is the free GPL Shopping cart software.

[Lamps Lighting and More]

while there are many fundamentals that must work together for search engine optimization marketing to be effective, the SEO page title is among the most important. Effective SEO page titles inform both search engines and searchers what your web pages are about.

[JasonP]

We're moving forward with Magento for our next project. Hope it's as good as I've heard

[seomagician]

Used Osc and Zen in the past and liked them a lot but they are not modern design friendly. CSS designs/templates can be a pain. Tested Magento but go frustrated pretty fast. It's overly complicated and slow. Testing CS Cart and liking what I see.

[byronc]

I used virtumeart and think its ALL powerful in terms of shipping, payments, worl coverage BUT and a big but, I tried doing a site where there were mutiple variable fro item.

e.g. for a business card you need to select, sides, paper type, color, size, qty, et, etc and it could not do a price - this would have to be hand coded.

was a pain to skin aswell. but most people who use joomla swear that this is the best one.. There are better looking ones, but they dont have all the features

its free too

[blitzen]

We're moving forward with Magento for our next project. Hope it's as good as I've heard

Jason,
How's it going for you?

Magento is super strong but, it does take quite a bit of knowledge and time if you are developing yourself. I have personally used it with much success including a single admin/multiple domain instance. I do recommend it IF you are willing to put in the time and effort to 1) learn it in-depth OR 2) hire a competent Magento developer to perform the work.

To hire a competent Magneto anything is extremely costly. The "Enterprise" partners pay Magento $100,000/year for the privilege of reselling and being a developer. Then, they have to pay 10% of their sales. Thus, the cost.

To get their free version functional will cost you in either lots of time or money. Buying extensions doesn't guarantee that they will work, and if they do, they can be missing expected features.

I got a quote from a Mage developer - $30,000+.
That's just installation, no design, no customization.
They nickle-n-dimed the quote by including things like "one-page checkout, 1 day's work for $1200", "product compare, 1 day's work for $1200", "wish list, 1 day's work for $1200", etc. These functions are all included in the installation that I can do in a half hour!

You can have a product page where you enter quantities for each piece, like a dining table set.
You _cannot include selections such as color, cushions, etc, unless you're willing to pay $9,000 to buy a mod that allows you to add a selection list for color or cushions.

I, a seasoned programmer, spent months working to customize Magento for a very simple website. It's not that easy with features spread out over several files. You need to learn their own "syntax". One command may work on one page but not another. Their docs are minimal. Sure, their forum is active, active with people asking questions and no answers.

Unfortunately, to learn the software is a trial-n-error process with their minimal documentation. Even the program itself isn't documented.

Beware, even going from version 1.3 to 1.4 broke functions for their users.

The software misses some very basic functions. Some missing features include
1. Shipping products from different locations with different methods (they have you ship all products from one location with only one method, either UPS or FedEx or percent of order, ...),
2. Being able to edit an order (YES! edit an order is not possible unless you buy buy buy extensions and there's no guarantee they will work or have what you expect),
3. Showing subcategories and images on a category page,
4. Easily moving things around in the layout, and
5. Printing an order/invoice from their Admin interface (I can print it from the email confirmation but why should I have to do that?).

With that business model, I wonder how far Magento will progress.

DO YOU HAVE A GOOD SUGGESTION?
After wasted months with Magento, I'm back to square one.
Can anyone recommend good software that meets these conditions?
1. Open Source.
2. I purchase and load on my server, not rent for a per-month fee.
3. Any language except binary (I ran into one open source program and after downloading and starting to test it, I discovered it was binary!).

After that, I can program anything except scratch-n-sniff.

A little help would be appreciated.

[edlaw]

I found that oscommerce is working well for me. I do have an issue with recurring billing though. Any ideas?

[seiretto]

I recommend tomatocart (it is a hybrid from oscommerce version 3 they never released) looks good and blows oscommerce clear out the water!

[Wistipouf]

We went with k-eCommerce because of their integration with MS Dynamics Great Plains. It's not open source but they have good support.