Ecommerce/Online store - would U youse Zencart or Magento?

What do you use now?

eBay... but their fees are killing me. I already have a wordpress website where I direct people to my ebay store. In looking at e-commerce solutions (on a very tight budget, but plenty of time) it seemed like zencart and magento were popular but I really don't know.

Ok zencart is basic and you'll find people to customise it for you.

MAgento is new and complex and harder to find people to customise it. It's better but you will require a bigger server and be warned of pci pa-dss requirements coming next year.

The PCI PA-DSS and July 2010

ZenCart is more developed and has a bigger community behind it. It also has some excellent tools on the back-end. I installed Magento once but didn't deploy it -- seems like more trouble than it's worth.

For my money Ubercart is the best thing going, but I'm a Drupal fanboy.

Magento is better if you can get past the pains of installing it...
Being newer...It also has smaller community support levels & template options...

If you have hosting through hostgator...they will install magento for you for a $35 fee...not bad at all if you ask me.....or....you can possibly find a warrior here to do an install....not sure what other hosting services do...some may offer this also.

In talking with a hostgator tech last week...he informed me that fantastico...a part of CPanel will in the future be adding magento as an e-commerce "one click upload" like they do with oscommerce & zencart....but thats a ways off still....hostgator would not 100% confirm this because they do not own fantastico.
Me...untill I actually see it...it's just a rumor...so don't take it as gospel.

Me personally.....I have gone from oscommerce to zencart to magento...(didn't get past the download)....back to zencart (for now...i'm having hostagtor do a magento install for me)....until then zencart works well for me.

Paypal would work with all of them...

Good luck,
Ken

I used ZenCart for a bigger site I had that needed a lot of inventory control. I loved it. Being open source helped tremendously because there was a TON of people who had work-arounds and easy fixes for things that cropped up. Can't say anything good or bad about Magento.

John

Hi,

I used to use oscommerce and got some good results from it, just testing out a new cart that has been launched today for my Delavo - pretty good so far.

I decided to hold off on Magento in favour of the Delvo one so don't really know it.

Brian
Delavo Ambassador (UK)

Neither ZenCart or Magento are PCI Compliant, which is a deal-breaker. No PCI = No $$, pretty simple!

CRELoaded is PCI Compliant though (to hear them tell it anyway). Welcome to CRE Loaded - CRE Loaded

Personally I don't like the design of CRELoaded, but if I could accept payments using it, well that pretty much seals the deal.

MW

I used Zencart and it was a pain to set up...I just stick with paypal now...

I had zencart for a site, but I got mucked around and had hassles with them. I'm on the lookout for a good provider too.

Paypal is as easy as pie and is popular.

Cheers

I'm able to set up and fully skin a ZenCart site in about 4 hours now (including graphics work)... it's really not that hard.

ZenCart is a lot easier than OSCommerce or CRELoaded. It's miles easier than Magento.

Of the 4, ZenCart is definitely the easiest.

**speaking from first-hand experience, having used all 4 on my ecomm site. We finally settled on ZenCart as the best option for selling physical products.

MW

I don't think that anyone can give you a meaningful answer without more information. It's like asking someone "How much is a car?"

You'd need to provide more information about things like:

1. How many different types of items are you selling, and are there large numbers of the same item?
2. Will they change often?
3. What sort of items are they - physical or electronic, or a mixture?
4. Do you intend to use your own merchant account, or just use Paypal?
5. How would you want the system to be updated?
6. Are you looking at a database system, or just HTML pages?
7. Are the products physical items, or electronic (ie e-books)?
8. Does inventory need to be tracked?
9. What is your IT skill level in relation to setting up and maintaining a shopping cart, or will you outsource everything?

There's MANY different answers to your question, including the products you mention, wordpress addons, services like e-junkie or mals ecommerce, etc. etc.

It all depends on your particular needs and situation.
Cheers, Eric G.

Yeah if you do have a need for a full shopping cart system the open source big ones offer you a much easier time when it comes to modding things and whatnot... but there's also some bigger secuirity issues as well. So there's good and bad.

Like mentioned above... It's PCI or nothing these days. Although if you're just using your cart to forward basic info over to a gateway which handles all of the sensitive stuff you'll be fine.

It's getting trickier and trickier all the time especially with the new PCI standards coming out.

Dave

Dave, what is PCI?

Remember, stay charged, power up!

Liam

--
BetterBatt.com.au - Batteries, Chargers, AC Adapters for Digital Still and Video Cameras, Notebook Computers, PDAs, Mobile Phones, Apple iPods, MP3 Players and more!

Email: sales@betterbatt.com.au
Phone: 1300 733 102 or 03 9017 3707 (+61 3 9017 3707 for international calls)

I have been looking at Prestashop.com. You have to search through the forum there to see that it can handle digital products. Does anyone here have experience with it?

> what is PCI?

PCI stands for Payment Card Industry.

If you want to accept credit cards on your web-site you are to be PCI-DSS compatible and use a PA-DSS certified solution (see pcisecuritystandards.org/security_standards/pa_dss.shtml)

Neither Magento nor ZenCart offer PA-DSS for small business owners! Well, Magento offers, Professional edition $3k a year. However, the most of their merchants use Community Edition.

Have you looked at PrestaShop?

Take a look at PremiumWebCart if you're
looking to have all your business tools under
one login ...if you're going to run multiple
websites then this is really the only option
for you as it is the only system that has
"replication" of all it's systems.

Nobody else has even thought of this
technology the way this company did. It
literallychanged the way I do business.