Are you joking me? We've done well over 150 shopping carts using Magento, And ZenCart and CubeCart and many others and never lost a client... most come back for 2nd sites, graphic work, paid updates and more....
Ignore his post. I highly recommend Magento for large websites (since its a heavy script great for big sites with tones of product); ZenCart & OScommerce works great on small/medium size shopping product sites.. Cubecart is just OK to use.
Two things.
1) Learn to read.
"and do it yourself". Shitting gold bricks? Go with magento. Want to deal with a labyrinth? Go with zencart, oscommerce or cubecart.2)Magento is bloated. It is slow. It is excess. Zencart, OSCommerce and Cubecart were made so long ago that they also fit into the bloat category. It's all scrapped together with no rhyme or reason.
2)
Every single client I've dealt with that had a site on one of the previous expressed great frustration in using it and doing upkeep themselves. Bad admin interface, expensive, lack of support etc.
There are 2 I use, soon to be 3.
X-cart. Fits in
near Magento. It's quite bloated which causes heavy resource usage. The upsides are the amount of mods available for it (paid and free), the templating system, and the support from the community. Price range for a cart using X-cart is in the $200->$750 range for the cart itself and mods.
Pinnacle cart. This is almost the same as x-cart minus the bloat. It was made more recently so the methods are more refined and faster. All the x-cart pros, with one glaring con... To get access to the source you need to buy the selfhosted version which is $700-$900 right off the bat.
Opencart. I've not yet built a client website with this one, still doing testing. So far it's seeming to work out good for speed and flexibility.
The reasons why I suggest against Magento etc:
Magento. Bloat. Holy fucking bloat. They took to using an OOP approach to the extreme where it didn't make sense to, as well as database. Not only does it slow down the cart in general, it will nuke most peoples mysql setup. People here on this forum generally don't know much more than copy and paste, so assuming he knows how to optimize would be betting against the odds. Adding new pages with even a little custom code is far more complex than just dropping in .php page. Lastly, support (or lack of.) Don't expect to get help from the creators, you need the yearly license which is several thousand. The community is also non-existant which leaves you figuring out the problem yourself. So in the end, unless your shitting gold bricks and know php/mysql optimization, have less than 100 products or are just loco then magento is a bad choice.
OSCommerce and Zencart. I put these two together because OSCommerce is/was a fork of zen. Zencart was made in 2003 and the code base reflects that. Everything is patched together and there's been no noticeable code refactoring. The templating system is botched and not easy to work with. The community is 50/50. You sometimes get help, you sometimes don't. Resource usage was on the low end of all the other carts.
Cubecart. A little more recent than zencart so the code isn't as spaghetti. You will still need to optimize it, as I started noticing a slow down just after 5000 products. Support is fairly fast but not useful to any extent. Templating is better than zencart but still lacking a little in my opinion.
What you'll learn from this thread: Go with whatever the hell you want. Everyone has their picks of carts for their own reasons. You're asking what the best car is, or the best tasting beer... It's what you like.
