Ecommerce (open-source)
There seems to be a number of open-source ecommerce packages gaining in popularity this past year, upgrading and coming out of beta. Just as Drupal and Joomla are dominating the open-source CMS market (along with one of my faves, CMS Made Simple), the ecommerce arena may soon have a few dominant players. (Or maybe not.)
Below is a quick run-down of what I’ve seen out there. What are you using?
Zen-Cart
Well-known and well used, with years of development behind it and an active community of developers and supporters. Powerful features, integrates with any number of payment gateways, and plenty of free add-ons/modules available, but still very old school looking. Will it ever get to Zen Cart 2.0?
UberCart
Due to its integration with Drupal, UberCart seems to be taking off with a lot of developers. Allows for custom product fields, anonymous checkout, and one-page checkout.
VirtueMart
All the standard features you’d expect, but like UberCart and Drupal, VirtueMart’s main virtue seems to be its integration with Joomla and Mambo.
Magento
One of the most attractive packages out of the box, with the ability to manage multiple stores under one admin. Paid support available. Still very new, just out of beta, I’ve heard mixed reviews of how ready-for-primetime this software is yet.
PrestaShop
Just ran across this European offering, with a neat, easy-to-understand backend admin. Doesn’t seem to have a lot of payment gateways supported as of yet.
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Where you reading my tweets last night?
Have you had a look at ZenMagick – an object-oriented replacement for the zen-cart storefront code.
It is build on top of a custom MVC framework and an (also) object-oriented database API.
There are now a few free themes available that can be checked out at http://demo.zenmagick.org/
cheers, mano
I’m for open source and all, but for 24 bucks a month the folks at shopify have me hooked. It’s dreamy
Thank for the ZenMagick tip, I’ll check that out. Shopify seems like a good solution to getting a store going quickly, and is definitely an option I’d consider for a client. I had a good first impression.
We at Creed Interactive ( http://www.creedinteractive.com )typically use an inexpensive boxed e-commerce package over open source. While open source is great, it has been a benefit to us to have some extra support for the product and have a centralized decision making body to determine what features are in the product vs. not in the product. Some of the open source products are overloaded with features that our clients will never use. This tends to make the systems more difficult to work with and less efficient. We have heard good things about Magento and a couple of our guys have played around with it.
I’ve just finished my first site in Magento. Take a look. The owner wanted a few things changed to suite her clientele. Would love some feedback. http://www.dspfineart.com is the store. The rest of her site is built with WordPress: http://www.deborahsussex.com.
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[...] got to stay flexible. I just posted a run down of several open-source ecommerce programs over at MNteractive, and will continue to look those over (and others). Here’s a quick list of the programs [...]