Moving on from basic ecommerce

[les78]

I currently have a shop hosted by ekmpowershop but am now starting to think I have grown out of it.

What would be the next step up in your opinion? I know alot of people are raving about magento but I think this is a step too far in both price and complexity. I like to tinker with my website and I am learning as I go and I think magento would be too complex for me initially and I just haven't got the time to learn it yet.

I like the SEO friendlyness of ekmpowershop and don't think I would have got as far as I have now if I had gone with alot of the other basic ecommerce packages out there.

What extra features I am looking for are mainly filters and sort by options

Have I found a niche in the market as I can't find anything inbetween.

Any tips?

 

[florenceij]

What features do you need for your e-commerce store?
Beside filters and sort by options e.g discount code, which payment options, product display any additional attributes etc.

I need a bit more info there are loads of other solutions out there like oscommerce, zencart, joomla, wordpress. In the long run if you have the funds go for magento otherwise one of these will do but you need the right one that can meet all your needs. Most of these have adds ons for SEO etc.

 

[kaifu]

Magento Community Edition is available as free open-source software that you can download and install yourself.

Renting shared hosting only costs a few pounds per month, installing is a matter of copying some files by FTP and using the graphical installation user interface.

Just because Magento has more features than you need right now, does not mean you will not need them in the future. Look forward 3 months, 6 months, 2 years - could your requirements change as your business grows?

An eCommerce system I liked for its simplicity was OpenCart - might be worth a look.

 

[ICEY]

I went from EKM to Bluepark and have been delighted with it.

 

[mayo23]

Have tried out most of the open source shopping cart systems, and hated magento the most.

Even on my dedicated server, it was way too thirsty and way too slow. If you're thinking of hosting on shared server, visitors to your site will leave before too long.

I have developed my own system, which is basically a very highly customised version of osCommerce, but you need to be fairly competent in php to make osCommerce look good ( the basic layout is quite bad).

Of the ones that don't need too much customising to look good, I thought that Prestashop and Opencart were probably the best ones out there.

Hope this helps

 

[edmondscommerce]

when did you last try Magento?

things have got a hell of a lot faster in Magento world..

osCommerce sites often do evolve into very powerful highly bespoke systems and I have a few clients like that who have god knows how many hundreds of hours of developer time invested into making it handle tens of thousands of products, serve up pages in 0.1 seconds and have all kinds of SEO stuff going on.

Sites like this, although they have some remnants of osCommerce still in there, are not really indicative of what osCommerce really is to the average startup company trying to choose which platform.

If you want a platform that will run on the cheapest hosting then I would choose CRE Loaded.

If you can afford a decent shared host or maybe a VPS then Magento should definitely be in your short list. It will grow with your business like no other platform out there can.

Its not that hard to learn how to use, we do a one day magento training course which gives you all the core skills you need to run a store. One day isn't a long time - I think that is indicative of how difficult it is - not too tricky really.