Which e-commerce platform?

[Amaresh]

Hi. I am in the process of choosing an e commerce platform for my website. Looking for feedback on Zen Cart and Magento. I have read that Magento takes a long time to load and does not perform well on shared hosting. Which platform would you prefer from a long term perspective? Regards

[barginboyrob]

I use joomla and virtuemart, works alright to me!

[Duncan_W]

If your site is primarily an e-commence site, I would not recommend the Joomla/VirtualMart route. I believe in "Horses for Courses" and although we develop sites in Joomla (an excellent CMS) if your site is first and foremost going to be a shop, I would recommend something like CRE Loaded.

We have focused on this system over recent years, and have developed a number of very cost effect & successful e-commerce sites (you can see them in our gallery http://www.bsamarketing.com/sitegallery.htm).
It is developed on OsCommerce so has great support, and has pretty much any feature you could want.

[edmondscommerce]

The main issue I have with CRE is that it is at the end of its lifecycle whereas Magento is at the beginning. Therefore for any new website I think investing in a Magento solution is the smart move.

Most of Magento's initial issues with speed etc have been resolved with the latest releases.

[cycloneuk]

I and many sites use X-Cart, very powerfull with lots of features and a large selection of paid mods available.

[regencychess]

Our main trading website is a Zencart site. With the number of custom mods available it can be very flexible.

The link to the site in question is in my forum sig.

[Duncan_W]

I agree that Mageno is promising, but (and I am happy to be corrected on this one if I am wrong!) Currently the "Open Source" Magento offering is an unsupported free download. If you want their full version and any support) you will pay $9k per year for the privilege. In my opinion, this takes it out of the CRE Market.

Although I accept that it is not perfect, the thing I like about CRE is you get the best of both worlds. Lack of tie in or ongoing costs offered by Open source, coupled with the ability to get ongoing support if needed.

[edmondscommerce]

Hi Duncan

It puts it in exactly the same place as CREloaded, which is also open source.

You can pay for CRELoaded as well, though I would never recommend it.

There is no need to purchase full Magento support either, but the fact that they do offer Enterprise level support and an Enterprise version of the system is testament to the quality of the platform. It can scale to big corporate ecommerce websites.

The free version has the same architecture and is essentially the same system without a few extra cherries on the top.

There are plenty of companies who will support the open source Magento platform, you don't have to purchase support from Varien.

[Red Eye Media]

Hi Duncan,
If you want a hosted solution without the installation headaches, why not take a look at our system. Fully hosted system and low cost.

[bdw]

Isn't shopmaker built on OSCommerce?

[Red Eye Media]

Isn't shopmaker built on OSCommerce?

Absolutely not.
Shop Maker is completely 100% coded by us.
What makes you think that?

[bdw]

Sorry, I meant no offence it's just that your demo looks quite like OSC.

[Red Eye Media]

Sorry, I meant no offence it's just that your demo looks quite like OSC.

No offence taken.
Haven't had a look at their admin area for quite a while.

[openmind]

Sorry but I had to smile at this. Saying someone's eCommerce platform is based on osCommerce is like kicking their favourite pet dog or calling their missus ugly! :D

bdw - I'm only toying with you ;)

[Red Eye Media]

Lol. It could have been worse. They could have compared it to Actin** ;)

[awebapart.com]

It is a funny situation with osCommerce, and I'm sure that if you put it to some Zencart and CRELoaded evangelists that their system was based on osCommerce, they too might get the hump, even though Zencart and Creloaded are derivatives of osCommerce.

We are in a similar, contradictory sounding, situation too. We wouldn't normally recommend that small businesses go the DIY osCommerce (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=415796) route, but we think that our sitebuilder solution which has our custom version of osCommerce (http://www.awebapart.com/home/sitebuilder_features) as a shop section of the site, is a good solution for some businesses.

Sometimes it is not the underlying ecommerce platform which is the issue, but the visual look of the shop, and we have tried with our solution to make client sites look different to the usual 3 column oscommerce shop websites out there. To that extent, our ecommerce sites, which use osCommerce, might end up looking less like osCommerce sites than other sites built using other ecommerce systems! (in some ways even Amazon has a similar look and feel to default osCommerce - or is it the other way around)

If anybody is looking for UK hosted managed solutions based on custom improved, not default, versions of osCommerce or its deriviatives, then www.paceretail.co.uk (http://www.paceretail.co.uk) and www.rentacart.co.uk (http://www.rentacart.co.uk) have a ZenCart based hosted solution, and we, www.awebapart.com (http://www.awebapart.com), have a partial (part sitebuilder, part osCommerce for the shop section) osCommerce based hosted solution.

[edmondscommerce]

I've seen plenty of systems worse than osC..

The very worst were custom bespoke systems.

In all fairness to good old osC - it was made years ago and still stands up to the demands of the average startup ecommerce business

[green.jeni]

Most of Magento's initial issues with speed etc have been resolved

[sourcez]

I personally feel magento is more complicated than something like Zen, and they are constantly changing the code at the moment.

We use zen on our main and it works great; but I aim to switch to Magento on our second. Just need to develop some sort of courier module etc etc etc - you know what it's like!

[edmondscommerce]

I personally think Magento is awesome. But be prepared to learn advanced topics like object oriented programming, XML, EAV database structure, MySQL foreign keys etc.

Its much more complex than osC but in return you get much more power. I think it's well worth it.

[awebapart.com]

Magento... EAV database structure
Interesting. Depending on how and to what extent the Magento team have implemented EAV (Entity Attribute Value model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-Attribute-Value_model)) that might help explain some of the performance issues they have had.

We heavily adopted EAV like techniques for the database under our sitebuilder content management system, and there are performance issues with EAV models, issues we solved by also having a push / caching content architecture (http://www.sitepoint.com/article/push-pull-best-cms/). But it is not so easy to do this completely for an ecommerce system since once people start adding products to basket you normally have to start hitting the database again.

Most advanced ecommerce systems, even osCommerce, have EAV in one form or another, even in a simple form, for product options, i.e. metadata (data about data), a database within a database, otherwise store owners wouldn't be able to create their own product option names like colour, and assign possible values to those product options like red, blue.

[edmondscommerce]

Download a copy, or take a look at this DB schema if your interested.
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/development/magento_database_diagram

In Magento, everything is an 'entity' and can have whatever attributes you can dream up. This makes it incredibly flexible. It also means that you can configure it extensively and still maintain full upgrade compatibility. That's impressive. Ask anyone whose modded their osC store about upgrade compatibility.

The other really impressive thing about Magento is the caching functionality. They haven't gone down the cached content (push) route as yet, though it will probably happen but are instead focussed on higher level caching techniques.

Recently they have implemented some 'flat' tables which effectively cache a bunch of EAV data to minimise the number of queries necessary for run of the mill products/categories/orders.

To see how much their caching systems make a difference, try running Magento with all of the caching disabled.. its dead slow. Of course you would never run a live store without the caching enabled.

Did I mention how easy it is to scale up a Magento based store to multiple DB servers? Edit one file.

Yes I like Magento a lot.

[OfficeDirect]

We have used zencart on a number of different project (latest in the signature) and it has never failed us.
With all of the additional modules available we have pretty much always been able to have any functionality from zencart that we have needed.

[awebapart.com]

Did I mention how easy it is to scale up a Magento based store to multiple DB servers? Edit one file.
That's fine, but if that is a feature that has only been added to overcome a magento performance problem via database replication (http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/performance-is-key-notes-on-magentos-performance/), then it is not really a feature (unless it has other benefits), it is more like a performance bug fix or workaround.

The point I was making with my link to the EAV Entity Attribute Value model description (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity-Attribute-Value_model), is that with any model, approach, design, architecture, there will be pros and cons. Yes, the EAV model has many pros including flexibility, but it also has cons too, including performance, extra complexity and steering away from the typical standard SQL relational database model (even though it uses SQL as its underlying platform).

The SQL relational database model itself has its own pros and cons too, as does any database structure that is designed on top of it.

I am in the process of choosing an e commerce platform for my website. Looking for feedback on Zen Cart and Magento. I have read that Magento takes a long time to load and does not perform well on shared hosting. Which platform would you prefer from a long term perspective?

As long as a business owner is aware, at the high level, of both the pros and cons of any given ecommerce architecture or platform, coupled with a good understanding of their own business requirements, then a business owner is more likely to make a good informed strategic decision about which is the best ecommerce solution for them (http://www.awebapart.com/home/faq/Best_ecommerce_solution). An important part of any ecommerce platform is its choice of database architecture, and whether or not it even chooses to have a database, e.g. Actinic Catalog does not have a database (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=676815), neither do external shopping carts (http://www.awebapart.com/home/faq/Best_shopping_cart) require onsite databases.

[SHEDLifestyle]

Hi Amaresh,
I'm a newbie to UKBF and ecommerce. I was in the same boat as you. I've finally gone for Magento. Not being an IT techie myself (I'm learning fast) it seemed to have all the functions and the look I required for my new soon to be ecommerce store. I was also advised it would best for my needs due to being quite adaptable in the future. I've read all the tech guys advice above and I think I may have made the right choice for my needs.. Will let you know in a month or so.. Other IT experts advised Actinic? but I just didn't like the look of it...
Hope that helps..

[shopintegrator]

Hi SHEDLifestyle,

Not being an IT techie myself (I'm learning fast) it seemed to have all the functions and the look I required for my new soon to be ecommerce store

Please do consider the Shop Integrator ecommerce service (http://www.shopintegrator.com/ecommerce/ecommerce.html) in your investigation as it is ideal for non-IT techies to use to plug-in ecommerce (http://www.shopintegrator.com/feature/ecommerce-plugins.html) in to their web pages. If you can copy and paste the automatically generated Shop Integrator text in to your web pages, you can use it to create a feature rich professional looking online store.

[charles2]

hi

A brand-newed business platform share with you
http://en.hisupertrade.com

[edmondscommerce]

That's fine, but if that is a feature that has only been added to overcome a magento performance problem via database replication (http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog/performance-is-key-notes-on-magentos-performance/), then it is not really a feature (unless it has other benefits), it is more like a performance bug fix or workaround.


No its a been a feature from day one. The entire system is coded with a read and a write DB adapter.

The benefits are that if your store really takes off and you need to scale up to a multi server solution, you can do this really easily. Any other system I have seen would require huge amounts of work to allow it to scale this way..

Its future proofness basically. They haven't done this as a performance work around.

[openmind]

Not necessarily, MySQL5 has supported slave DB servers for some time now which would instantly decrease performance degradation when it comes to the database side...

[awebapart.com]

The benefits are that if your store really takes off and you need to scale up to a multi server solution, you can do this really easily.
So if the only benefit is scalability, whether it is a real benefit or not depends on how Magento compares to other ecommerce systems in the scalability stakes, i.e. at what point on the scale of numbers of visitors or numbers of products would one database server not be enough for the ecommerce system. If it is a much lower point on the scale for Magento due to its design and performance issues, whilst other ecommerce systems would quite happily continue scaling up on the one database server (or no database server as in Actinic (http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?p=676815)'s case), then this Magento "feature", whilst initially sounding impressive, may actually be an indicator of a less than impressive performance design issue (perhaps an issue they knew about from day 1, which is why they implemented the multi db feature from day 1).

[edmondscommerce]

if you drive a ferrari expect it to drink some fuel..

Magento is a powerful system and has higher requirements than other systems, but I don't personally see it as in issue.

Same with any software.

If you want to recommend Actinic over Magento because it has less requirements that's your call - but I think your crazy!

[awebapart.com]

if you drive a ferrari expect it to drink some fuel..
Heh heh. I also use transport analogies in my article about choosing the most appropriate ecommerce solution (http://www.awebapart.com/home/faq/Best_ecommerce_solution) based on the requirements of a business... choosing the right tool for the job.

If you want to recommend Actinic over Magento because it has less requirements that's your call - but I think your crazy!
In that particular comparison, I'm not making any recommendations one way or another (especially not without knowing the business requirements), I'm merely commenting on how system design and architecture choices can affect what pros and cons a particular ecommerce system might have.

[edmondscommerce]

fair enough.

Yes I suppose if your main priority is that the system will run on the very minimum of cash then you would judge the merit of the system based solely on that. I suppose the ultimate system there would be to use notepad to create static html files and host them on some free hosting somewhere.

If however you want a good balance of powerful features, scalability and performance with no cash outlay (open source) then Magento is top of my recommendations list.

[SolReka]

What's wrong with Joomla and Virtuemart with regards to an integrated ecommerce website.

For some start ups (myself included), forking out $50/month for an ecommerce package is just NOT a viable option.

What's wrong with virtuemart?

[justintime]

Was a big lover of Cubecart but on a recent project used Zencart and am quite impressed. Read quite a bit about Magento recently but im not techie minded so would probably struggle with it.