The best eCommerce setup?

[Dan Da Man]

Award winning. lol. Awards by anyone but non-biased experts in the respective field is nothing but brown nosing or ignorance.
Magento is the biggest PoS I've ever seen. If you're not spending $200/month on a dedicated to handle 5 viewers at the same time, then you're spending $150/hr for customization. All it does right is a nice admin interface. The rest? Pure shit.

Edit:
Also, if you want any kind of official support you have to pay their fee. This last I checked was $12,000/year. They don't give a rats ass about the community edition users.

I have yet to have any problem with magento. For me, it has everything I need and more. I have about 5 e commerce stores at the moment and I pay a developer in Bangladesh to copy over a site that I like and do the customization for about $200 a site. Have not had a problem yet and I dont see what problems I would have.

Backend is awesome, so yes, award winning as it is winning me over every single time

 

[bigwhite]

I have yet to have any problem with magento. For me, it has everything I need and more. I have about 5 e commerce stores at the moment and I pay a developer in Bangladesh to copy over a site that I like and do the customization for about $200 a site. Have not had a problem yet and I dont see what problems I would have.

Backend is awesome, so yes, award winning as it is winning me over every single time

Exactly, don't bash on Magento if you do not know how to use it to its fullest capabilities! You need to toy around with it for a while and get the hang of it. It comes to you and can be very powerful over time. I have never had any issues getting a PSD converted to Magento, so as far as development goes, it can be expensive, but well worth it in the end. Eventually if you ever get big enough, you will probably want to switch to Magento. Save yourself the hassle of exporting and migrating over to it in the future. If you have a low budget, Magento may not be for you.

 

[darkfury]

"best" "ecommerce" and "wordpress" - Hell no...

Magento - It might be heavy with a lot of products, modules and a large customer base etc but there are many things you can do to improve to improve the speed such as APC, Memcached, writing /cache/ to directly to RAM, CDN etc etc

My advice - If you've got a cPanel VPS/Dedi then go grab an Installatron license (just to make life easier) and have an arse around with various cart systems and get a feel of how they all work

 

[roster67]

I'll go for Prestashop, best solution from my point of view!

 

[jazzc]

If we 're talking about e-commerce as the primary function, Magento is the heavy weaponry.

You 'll hear a lot of moaning about Magento because low/mid level PHP programmers can't handle customizing it. Magento is coded in a way that follows standards mainly used in so-called "enterprise" languages like Java. Those methodologies are like Greek to most PHPers and if you put them in charge of a customization project they tend to commit suicide And those who don't, simply say that Magento is shit.

Regarding the "Magento is slow" objection. Magento is designed to be ultra-flexible so it can cover any e-commerce scenario. That 's its strength. Magento out of the box is indeed slower than others because of the genericness in the design. Yet, for people that actually know Magento, it is really easy to optimize it to work very fast.

 

[wbdzgnr]

Magento would be best for you since this is for a real business site. Wordpress is just ideal for small sites that needs to sell a few stuffs or for membership sites.

 

[Kosher1]

Wordpress with cart66 is best.

 

[Kosher1]

Magento would be best for you since this is for a real business site. Wordpress is just ideal for small sites that needs to sell a few stuffs or for membership sites.

Agreed! If client wishes to learn it.

 

[KINGCOS]

Magento, If high traffic , no shared hosting, good for admin\keeping track of orders etc

 

[kvmcable]

Magento is terrible for real business with real products. I've developed many sites with it through the years and it's poorly written bloatware. Previous comments about it being slow are correct. I ran caching, had it on a dedi by itself and the only people that I know that say it's fast are people that don't know what fast is. I run ecommerce sites with over 100,000 products and 1,000 uniques a day. Toss that on your Magento platform and watch your server melt.

If you don't know much about ecommerce I'd recommend a hosted solution like Big Commerce. It lacks a bit of SEO benefits but it has an active forum, works out of the box and you have support if you run into issues. It also has some a FB app so you can link your products to your FB company page and such. If you mess with Magento or some of the other suggestions you'll be spending your time learning rather than promoting. For small business that wasted energy.

 

[jazzc]

Magento is terrible for real business with real products.

Oh Really?

http://www.bonobos.com/
http://www.samsung.com/
http://www.homedics.com/
http://www.thenorthface.com/

Need I add more?

 

[kvmcable]

Oh Really?

http://www.bonobos.com/
http://www.samsung.com/
http://www.homedics.com/
http://www.thenorthface.com/

Need I add more?

Yes add some websites that don't have an in-house e-commerce development team - lmao. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't have a million dollar budget for a team of in-house developers. Show us some websites using the community version of Magento run by small business owners that have little to no experience. Those websites have thousands of hours of code massaging by very skilled coders and I doubt any of those are running community Magento versions.

I shouldn't have made such a general statement. Obviously if you have good developers on your staff you can make Magento work. I was speaking of an inexperienced business owner just looking to get his products to market with a reasonable solution running light hosting and little overhead. Magento doesn't qualify for this objective. Sorry to step on your Magento toes.

 

[jazzc]

Yes add some websites that don't have an in-house e-commerce development team - lmao. I'm pretty sure the OP doesn't have a million dollar budget for a team of in-house developers.

First of all, you really don't need a million dollar budget to get a decent Magento site.

Secondly, as I said, Magento is the heavy weaponry. Not for the DIY average Joe type or the small-timer. Sure, if you want to go low budget - lots of other better options and it 's better to go that way, if, for example, you are doing an Amazon affiliate store.

When you choose software solutions that does not fit the need, your costs will be much much higher in the long run, that getting a programmer who knows his shit to set you up with a proper solution. I assume that point needs to further explanation.

Show us some websites using the community version of Magento run by small business owners that have little to no experience

I have a store for a bricks & mortar business that runs a customized Magento CE 1.6.1 on a crappy VPS server, but you 'd have to take my word on it.

Sorry to step on your Magento toes.

I don't own it anyway. I just don't like misinformation spreading.

 

[geist7]

Another vote here for magento

 

[skull88]

Don't bother all the other comments and go for zen cart, not a resource hogging monster that nobody understands and will cost you a fortune but a dream to customize and it won't break how many customers and products you have.

 

[strug11e]

I've used Magento and personally love it.

 

[JimmyWong]

Hey. I've been in the ecommerce game for close to 8 years now.

Allow me to make this simple for ya This is assuming you have an interest in web development and you're starting from scratch.

- First off, completely ignore any suggestions of using Wordpress. Total rubbish.
- Install either Prestashop or Opencart on your shared hosting. Set it up. Learn the ropes and add the products. (Time taken: you will be selling in 3 weeks max at a casual pace)
- Now purchase a second domain / use your computer. This will be your test bed.
- Purchase a cheap VPS. Install Magento.
- Spend the next few months casually learning the ropes. Familiarise yourself with it and the necessary languages. Master it. It'll become a hobby.
- Fingers crossed now you're making a decent turnover from your original cart. By this point you could be wanting an upgrade and have more functionality.
- Now you'll be ready as ever to move to Magento.
- Bingo.

This is what I'd do. May not work for you mind. Good luck regardless.

Jimmy

 

[fiverivers]

I use wordpress platforms systems shopperpress because I can put a finish web page up in several time. They look amazing and execute well, however, I'm not sure if they are the best because I haven't tried much else.

 

[KINGCOS]

Hey. I've been in the ecommerce game for close to 8 years now.

Allow me to make this simple for ya This is assuming you have an interest in web development and you're starting from scratch.

- First off, completely ignore any suggestions of using Wordpress. Total rubbish.
- Install either Prestashop or Opencart on your shared hosting. Set it up. Learn the ropes and add the products. (Time taken: you will be selling in 3 weeks max at a casual pace)
- Now purchase a second domain / use your computer. This will be your test bed.
- Purchase a cheap VPS. Install Magento.
- Spend the next few months casually learning the ropes. Familiarise yourself with it and the necessary languages. Master it. It'll become a hobby.
- Fingers crossed now you're making a decent turnover from your original cart. By this point you could be wanting an upgrade and have more functionality.
- Now you'll be ready as ever to move to Magento.
- Bingo.

This is what I'd do. May not work for you mind. Good luck regardless.

Jimmy

Brah you making some good money from ecommerce? Profit margins for your products?

 

[subster]

I'd use for every e-commere project this one:

http://www.commerce-seo.de/

(it has english frontend/ backend by default installation, too).
It is pure awesomeness- Feautrich, great optimized from scratch and a breeze to use.

BTW: I run a shop on this with 8K products, 14K customers and about 3K uniques/day. And the performance is still flashy.