Which eCommerce Platform?

[andystorey]

Dear MOZ community members

We currently run a custom built IIS/ASP/SQL Server system that is starting to fall apart and needs major overhaul.  I'm currently evaluating a number of open source eCommerce platforms (Magneto, OpenCart) and would welcome any advice that some of you may have.

We are not a major brand, but we have a good name in our field which we wish to maintain and we ranking very well for our top phrases despite not having SEO-friendly URLs amongst other things.

I've downloaded Magneto and installed it on a LAMP could server and got it up and running.   It looks very flexible, albeit a little bloated and I can concerned that it's a sledgehammer to crack a nut.    Do any other small businesses have experience with Magneto?

Thanks for your time!

andy

www.prendas.co.uk

[jjwoods3]

Hi Andy, once you select an ecommerce platform, if you want to go mobile with your online shop I invite you to check out our mobile commerce solution Shopgate which will integrate with whichever ecommerce platform you decide to go with. For example, we are a Magento Gold Partner and would be able to quickly create a mobile website and app with the same look and feel as your current website. Whichever way you decide to go, good luck!

[Everett]

All great answers and input. There is no clear-cut answer to the "best eCommerce platform" question, unfortunately. They all have their problems and strengths. I think you will be relatively safe with either Magento or OpenCart, as they are both popular platforms with large communities.

You might also consider Volusion if you want to stay on the ASP Server.

A recent favorite of mine is BigCommerce.

[PaddyDisplays]

Thanks for the reply Andy

If you don't mind PMing me once you have a good look at magento vs opencart and come to a conclusion.  I think we are doing similar tasks, so maybe we can compare notes?

[andystorey]

yes, there is a sagepay payment gateway, plus one for paypal too.

i'm going to take a look at it this week.

The back-end pages look far more simple than the Magento equivelents, but I imagine there is more expertise out there for Magento, but I'm worried it's gonna cost us alot to develop.

[Rubix]

I do use Magento and i can recommend it but i can't compare with OpenCart as i haven't tried it yet.

For Magento, you can easily download pretty much all extensions that you would need but you pay for some of the required extensions. It might be worth make a list of what extension you need then check how much it would cost. Such as 'browse by', 'share on social networks ' ' one page checkout' , 'zoom' etc .  You can also find great templates and i found quite easy to learn Magento.

I hope that helps

[PaddyDisplays]

I was leaning towards Magento, but you have given me something to think about with opencart.  How big is the community? are there many opencart developers out there for doing small jobs? is there a plug in for payment gate ways like realex or sagepay?

[yeagerd]

For another view, OpenCart is great.  It has some wonderful features out of the box like coupon codes, gift certificates, an affiliate program, customer loyalty points and a lot more.  It is on MVC architecture so your theme, your code and your data are all fully separated.  This makes it nice if you want to add a mobile store then normally you have to either build one from scratch or use a program that manipulates the desktop site and make it work on mobile to some degree.  MVC allows you to simply use the same product pooling and build up a mobile site the same way the desktop site is.  But it is built to be mobile from the ground up.

I am sure many have this as well but if you adjust product much for $30 you can get an excel upload download module that allows you to build your product in excel which makes it uber simple to view a layout of your keywords and work with them to get the right flow through the cart.  You can even pull it and do a side by side with MOZ.com spreadsheets and fix your issues with ease then upload it and done.

It also has VQMOD which means that plugins can be added via XML at run time.  If you remove the xml file then the default files are rendered again instead.  So if a plugin breaks your cart, just delete and go.

The multi-store system is nice as well if you have use of it.  I spend about $400 on scripts with each OC install and end up with a eCommerce, mobile commerce and Facebook store that is fully integrated with oAuth2 and builds a newsletter list as well as a push to Facebook marketing list and control center in the admin.  Orders are emailed and print on payment receipt, abandoned cart reminders, GEOIP with 37 languages and 17 currencies that are fully automated and even rewrite parts of the code in the native language which helps with SEO.  Very CDN friendly and while there are a few quirks they are very easy to work around.

The MVC makes it fast to learn because you do not have all the code in one spot.  This makes it easy to follow and learn.  I have an OC install with a 5 pic 980x400 jQuery slider and over 2.5mb of other pictures alone on the front page with all the bells and whistles that loads in just under 1.5 seconds.

Security is also easy to achieve.  Of course nothing is secure out of the box but it does have SSL integration etc.  You can find a walk through to harden it and be done in about 5 or 6 hours your first time and 2 hours total once you know what to do.

[PaddyDisplays]

To contradict Highland, I have used zen-cart for a e-commerce business and it has done very well with it (ceon seo module is a must), but it does have its limitations but as its open source so anything that it did not do out of the box or there was no add-ons for, we can hire a code from eg odesk to do for you.  If your on a small budget then zen-cart might be worth looking at.  I also found the zen-cart community great, its not huge, but it very close nit.

I'm currently looking at Magento to migrate an e-commerce store too ( not zen-cart).  Open source wise it the biggest system out there, and has a big community, lots of add-ons etc, and it does more things out of the box than zen-cart.  The only issue seems to be it can be slow if the hosting is not setup right for it (  seen alot of shared hosting sites have this problem),  But there are a lot of hosting companies that specialise in magneto hosting.

[Highland]

I helped my mother-in-law with her ecommerce. I tried Zen Cart (a fork of OS Commerce) but it's horrible in security and support, not to mention confusing. I've never gotten the impression that ZC is mature.

Magento is definitely much more mature and is now owned by eBay. I replaced ZC with Magento and it worked well until she shut her business down. My gripe with them is they went whole hog into Zend Framework 1, which is notoriously slow. It also has a bit of a learning curve. But it was stable and relatively secure (no major security flaws), just clunky to install.