The best eCommerce setup?

Hey Guys,

I own half of a furniture business and we are about to move to a new location. Our business website was paid for by my partner but i don't really like the system.

We are currently expanding to my home city and i'm going to take the web design into my own hands.

I've been looking over the eCommerce systems that are available and i'm really spoilt for choice

Any recommendations?

Thanks in advance!




p.s If anyones had any experience with WordPRess and eCommerce your views would be really appreciated!

WP ecommerce or Marketpress (same thing), is your best bet.

I use wordpress shopperpress because I can put a full site up in a couple of hours. They look nice and work well, however, I'm not sure if they are the best because I haven't tried much else.

These days I worked on a WordPress ecommerce website, so I used Shopp plugin :

It's really good and easy to customize.
Support is a bit busy however.

Beny

Wordpress Shopperpress simplest and good looking
Used WP ecommerce, simple as well. Good themes out for it so will look good.
The good thing about WP is all the plugins for SEO and other stuff as well

I did however just move to Magento. Found a be-a-utiful theme for it. Moving from WP, its a bit different, but the installation was seamless, the community support is huge and there are some decent plugins for free as well. The management system seems a bit better for what I wanted out of it, but if u know WP, go for one of the above mentioned.

Friend of mine is also using Prestashop and is raving about it. Havent tried it though

Magento is great. But theming.. Omfg its not fun at all

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Ignore everyone here suggesting to use anything Wordpress. Depending on how technically sound you are, I'd recommend Magento, CoreCommerce, Volusion, 3DCart, then Shopify.

I use opencart for mine and find it easy to use and perfect for what I need. There are free and paid themes available and plenty of plugins that do most things. The beauty for me is that they are always updating it and introducing new features to the basic setup.

Magento without a doubt. A few people have troubles with installation and theming, but the finished product is uncomparable to anything else (free at least). Wordpress probably isn't serious enough to be used as a large scale solution. One thing however, if you are hosting it yourself, you need to have a pretty hefty server, or a very optimised installation, as i've seen Magento databases go up to 60MB+.

... People, seriously? Do you recommend a prius to haul stock? Do you recommend an f150 to win a race? No. So why are you recommending wordpress for strictly ecommerce?

If you want to be flexible, ignore the idiots suggesting wordpress for doing ecommerce. Its a blog. Not a framework, not a cms, not a cart platform. By all means go with their advice if you don't mind bugs, lack of functionality, no support and all that fun stuff that comes with a "mod".


Also, Magento... Unless you're competent in OOP and server optimization you will fail. It's essentially a Rube Goldberg machine.


My suggestion on platforms are either:
1) PinnacleCart.
The application logic is not dealt with in theming. It uses the smarty templating engine so you work with almost pure html. If you mess up then no harm is done. Presentation would not effect the logic. You also got a company that made it specifically for ecommerce, and their support. They also have forums with active people. SEO is built in as well.
The downsides to this is you need to use their hosted solution (relatively expensive for what they're offering) or buy the code to host on your own server ($800).

2) X-cart
Same thing as pinnacle cart almost, but still with major differences. It's built using an older code base and procedural so there is alot of bloat. Also, the SEO built in is not that great. Templating is using smarty though. License is $70->$200, but you get upgrades to all versions and support. The forums are great and helpful. Downsides is the customizations needed. By default, you will want 2 mods and each cost about $150->$200.

3) Go to an ecommerce forum and get their suggestions. This is blackhat world where people suggest all the wrong things because "there is a mod for that!"

you get alot of tips here, ill add my 2 cents.. i use joomla + virtuemart for my white label webshop. works really good, but you have to be willing to learn it. (the learning curve isnt to steep) and best of all, its all free

You must think business and technical architecture when you are talking about e-commerce - how many current users hit the site? I ask because this will be heavy data driven by a back-end system (mysql, postgres, sql server, oracle, etc) and you will need to scale accordingly - running a plugin to a blog on hostgator will not give you 40 concurrent connections and allow 3 people to checkout simultaneously while 2 more add to a wishlist and 10 are doing searches and the remaining 25 are just browsing your furniture catalog

mgtarheels said:

Ignore everyone here suggesting to use anything Wordpress. Depending on how technically sound you are, I'd recommend Magento, CoreCommerce, Volusion, 3DCart, then Shopify.

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I agree with this. DO NOT USE WORDPRESS FOR E COMMERCE!

Wordpress is a blogging platform, it is not designed for selling physical products.

If you are serious about it, then Magento is the choice and the only choice for selling physical products. It is an award winning e commerce platform.

Anyone saying wordpress don't know what they are talking about.

Also, pinnaclecart is the worst ever! Big commerce is a great all in one solution as well.

i've been running an e-commerce website for three years, and also have tried wordpress e-commerce and such.

the thing with WP for an e-commerce site is just they tend to break if you have more than 500 products. With the constant update of wordpress and those shiny new plugin that you add here and there, an error is inevitable...

your best bet is with prestashop. it's free, fast and lightweight (especially in litespeed server), has a bunch of SEO features, has a stock management, etc. Prestashop wins an award for the best e commerce CMS for 2011... check it out!

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.

Magento is great if you are quite tech savvy, it really doesn't take that long to understand and if you run into any problems, there is a 99% chance someone else has in the world too so you can just google your question and it will most likely be answered

Zapdos said:

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.

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I don't think you'd need to go to the extent of getting a dedicated server If need be, you could ask your host to help you install caching software. Am running a Magento site at the moment on shared hosting with 1000+ products and is going pretty good.

But as for the development.. It will hurt your wallet.

One thing I always try to ask my clients is if they are looking for a primary function of a CMS and a secondary function of ecommerce or a primary function of ecommerce and a secondary function of a CMS. This would lead me and help me make the right decision for which platform I would want to use. WordPress is one of my favorite frameworks, I absolutely love it, but I would not recommend it with a 3rd party plugin to run an ecommerce site (even though i have done them before). If my client's first priority is ecommerce, i will recommend Magento.

I have worked with many different frameworks and have developed many different ecommerce sites and my opinion is that Magento is the most robust and scaleable ecommerce solution out there. As seen in other comments - it is not the easiest to skin or customize. But there are also some really good templates out there that could get you started.

As far as the server goes, I have done Magento sites on shared servers which worked decently, but for the most part most of the sites I have done are on Virtual Dedicated or Dedicated servers. Magento relies heavily on caching and the build is quite large and uses alot of resources. In some cases, I have had to even bump up the memory limits which cannot be done in a shared environment.

Hope this helps.

For those who suggest against WP, it is the OP request that anyone with WP as ecommerce platform to chime in.

Having that said, I agree that you should not use WordPress for e-Commerce. I personally would use Drupal Commerce. The flexibility of Drupal makes it a very good system. It has a steep learning curve, but once you get over it, I'm sure you won't look back.

But again, depends on what you're trying to accomplish, a simple shopping cart may work for you. I know a local e-commerce store which started with a free blog. They grow revenue to four figure before looking for semi-automated system and shopping cart.

Zapdos said:

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.

Click to expand...

Totally correct! Even absolute tech people got confused when it comes to customize Magento. I had first a team of indian programmers to do a migration. Didn't work. Then I got a team of German Programmers for thousands more - didn't work. I tried myself and learned hard. didn't work.
Magento is a piece of shit and I think there are about 10 people out there who can really make this monster work as they need it.