What Platform To Setup an E-Commerce Site for an Offline Business?

One of my clients is requesting for me to setup an E-Commerce site for him. I'm good with wordpress and have been making sites for clients on that, but have never done an E-Commerce site. Should I stick to making the E-Commerce site with wordpress (with themes from Templatic) or invest in some other tools that will help create an E-Commerce site either in wordpress or off? My plan is to make more E-Commerce sites in the future for businesses so I would not mind investing a little in some good tools.

Hopefully I was clear. I'm looking for a fast response so if you have any advice I'd really appreciate it.

hello Kyle, big fan of all your posts, good knowledge, similar thoughts, etc.. I myself am interested in the same thing for an offline biz i'm working on. I am going to sub this post to stay tuned. good luck!

ps nice affirmation!!

If you are dealing with more than a handful or products (say 50) I would stay well clear of WordPress.

OpenCart is a good option that can handle thousands of products, different payment methods and has tons of extensions. The community is excellent and support is good. The code base is also clean and easy to customize. You can also run opencart well in shared hosting environments.

Magento is a popular option for larger sites, it's the most advanced but also complex and will struggle on shared hosts. If it's your first go and you were contemplating Wordpress, I would stick to Opencart.

Magento all the way.

Don't use Wordpress for a commercial solution.

I've used shopperpress for small product shops on WordPress. But WP is not suitable for bigger shops where you have 100's of products. You really need dedicated ecommerce software for anthing over 100 products.

My brick and mortar business runs on Prestashop. I like it considering it's free. Version 1.5 will allow you to run mutliple shops from one admin. It's pretty good for SEO too, you can have friendly seo url's, add all the meta tags, keyword etc to individual products. I've used a paid cart before (Cubecart) and prefer Prestashop and it's free!

There's some good paid themes around for it and tons of modules. It is constantly updated and can now be updated automatically with one click. It's easy to use and if your clients are not computer savvy they should still be able to use PS easily enough.

Magento gets a lot of good press too. I tried that 18 months back and found it too complicated. I'd probably be ok with it now although I read there's still a steep learning curve, but I'm settled with PS and I'm very unlikely to change any time soon.

Thanks to all who have responded so far. Do you use any addons/extensions and do you find them to be expensive? Are they necessary? If so, which ones?

Thanks again.

For PS I haven't needed to buy any extra modules as the free ones installed with the basic set up are suitable for my needs. The only thing I've paid for is a couple of themes because the 2 that come with a very basic and I can't be arsed to modify them myself.

Good themes can be picked up for $30 to $50. But some of the modules are very expensive. I'd list all the modules here but you can see them on prestashop.com easily enough.

Pros:
Easy to use
SEO friendly
1 page guest checkout option
Cheap

Cons
Text description in categories pages can't be edited. So you can't add h1 tags, links, etc. It's just plain text only. You can do this on your product pages, just not on the cat pages.
Bundled themes are poor.

building a site currently with Magento it's very flexible, with great plug-ins such as Sweet Tooth for loyalty schemes

Shoppers Press is also a Good Option..as it is in Wordpress ..!!