Ecommercetemplates vs Magento

[internetspaceships]

Hi folks

Opinions please.

We're about to completely revamp our website. We're down to two templates, the ones mentioned in the title.

The important criteria are as follows:

We will be using batch uploads and incremental uploads to a total of in excess of 30,000 lines of stock.

The site will be using EPDQ and various other payment methods.

We will be looking to link with products such as icecat for product data.

We prefer a Linux platform incorporating mysql.

Any comments/recommendations/observations please?

Regards

Jon

[cmcp]

ECT takes a bit of rewriting and tidying up as it's very raw, Magento is great and modular straight out the box but you'll need Magento experience to develop with it so functionality can take longer to implement.

My personal preference is ECT as the flexibility in the front end and back end is so raw. But that's the downside for a lot of people wanting a more off the shelf enterprise esque solution.

[internetspaceships]

Thanks for that.

one of our concerns was the sheer time that Magento requires for uploading stock.

Raw works for us as we can play with it more, we're not looking too hard at "off the shelf ready to go"

[los_design]

Was about to look at ECT for you and tell you my thoughts but their demo link is broke LOL.

Anyways, you say the time it takes to upload? Magneto is PHP is it not? If so, then just format your products and bulk upload. Is that the only issue?

What are you currently using and why do you think you want to change?

How successful are you in the SERPs? Major structural changes can and will affect your sites ranking in the short term, have you evaluated the risks of this project?

Regards
Daren

[edmondscommerce]

I once worked on an ECT site doing some functionality customisation and vowed never to work on it again.

If you like ECT because its "raw (= old school)", go for an osCommerce based site as the quality of code is a lot better than ECT.

Honestly, I can't over emphasise how rubbish I think ECT is.

Please note I'm only talking about the PHP version. Maybe the ASP version is better, I have no idea.

If you want the latest and greatest though, go for Magento.

Re the product upload, Magento can be slow though if you are prepared to pay for it I have a system that pushes products in at a rate of about 5 per second, including creating all attributes, categories, the works. Its totally custom and not cheap though - it took me ages to get it to where it is.

osCommerce has something called Easypopulate which is decent enough for bulk uploading spreadsheets, or alternatively its simple enough to write custom systems to integrate with other data sources eg ICEcat or CNet (done both).

[consultant]

Hi Jon,

first off, 'We're down to two templates' - I am not sure about ECT, but Magento is not a template, it is a powerfull ecomerce system which will need a design or 'template' on top of it.

As for the ease of uploading products, there will be issues with any software you use.

You criteria should be more than ' I want to upload ...'. You should have a lot of requirements around what the site does! What are you using at the moment? Is there an migration path for it to a.n other system?

Most decent cart packages should allow bulk upload in one way or another!

[internetspaceships]

Hi Jon,

first off, 'We're down to two templates' - I am not sure about ECT, but Magento is not a template, it is a powerfull ecomerce system which will need a design or 'template' on top of it.

As for the ease of uploading products, there will be issues with any software you use.

You criteria should be more than ' I want to upload ...'. You should have a lot of requirements around what the site does! What are you using at the moment? Is there an migration path for it to a.n other system?

Most decent cart packages should allow bulk upload in one way or another!

Oh yes we have a lot of requirements. To be frank most of those are met by a number of packages, and I was actually wrong about Magento's upload speeds.

FYI this is actually our third revision of the website, the last being 2 years ago so we are fine tuning and making sure that this time we cover all the bases.