Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love...

blase40 · 12-12-2008, 01:14 AM

I have been using OsCommerce for one of my e-commerce sites for the past couple years and it has treated me fairly well. Considering it is open source with a decent variety of contributions available, I have been able to accomplish most of things I have wanted to with it.

But then.....

I set up newest store with Magento. I must say, I haven't spent more than a month or so with it, so I am sure there will be a few things I run into that will be slight drawbacks... but this platform is the ****.

Are there any other Magento users here? I would love to hear your thoughts. Especially those that have been using OsCommerce or ZenCart for years.

I have in recent months become sick and tired of the "clunkiness" of OsCommerce. From an SEO standpoint I also found it to be a bad platform, no matter how many contributions I utilized.

For those of you that are not familiar, check out the Magento site. Its also completely free and open source just like OSC.

Magento - Video Tour of Magento - eCommerce Software for Growth, Powered by Open Source

Mike Hill · 12-12-2008, 01:24 AM

Holy cow that's pretty cool software... I had no idea you could find this caliber in Open Source

Great find!

Mike Hill

jbreezy · 12-12-2008, 01:30 AM

Looks pretty solid..how easy was it to change templates and customize design?

freudianslip27 · 12-12-2008, 01:33 AM

Looks pretty cool. I haven't used oscommerce for a while but will definitely be checking this out as I will have a need for it in the future.

It is amazing how much open source can offer. Just take a look at WordPress.

Matt

Gail Sober · 12-12-2008, 01:42 AM

Looking forward to playing with it.

Fingers crossed that it can set pricing by length/width on the fly.

tommygadget · 12-12-2008, 01:50 AM

OSCommerce killed my business because after years online, Google did not know what I was selling. What an SEO nightmare. At the time I did not know that I was getting NO organic traffic because I chose the wrong software. When I realized it, I had a customized setup that would break with the slightest change and so was stuck with it to the bitter end.

TomG. - Magenta looks very nice IMO.

blakekr · 12-12-2008, 03:19 AM

I have really wanted to use Magento, the first time I saw someone using it I HAD to find out what it was. It's a little tricky to set up, or was a few months ago. Also I'm not sure if it can handle dropshipping. But I agree, it's head and shoulders ahead of what else is out there, or so it seems.

Mike Bogowski · 12-12-2008, 04:47 AM

Agreed!

oscommerce is junk, its a clunky app and horribly written!

The plus is that Magento is built on the Zend Framework so its sooooooo easy to customize and add to.

Jeffery · 12-12-2008, 06:21 AM

It is good, but it should only be used on a Dedicated or VPS if the site will be a moderate or busy site. Some shared hosts with low-end servers will not allow Magneto because of the high resources.

Jeffery 100% :-)

sentient · 12-12-2008, 07:01 AM

Hi

I use Magento for one of my ecomerce stores: Not sure if I'm allowed to post a link so to play it safe I won't.

It's fantastic considering it's "free", in that it is robust and has a huge amount of functionality and features. The problems come with customisation. It has a complicated database which isn't the easiest to manipulate. I've outsourced mine to people in Vietnam and Romania, but it's still cost me a few hundred dollars. So very good, but not completely free.

I use Prestashop for my other ecommerce stores - not as many features and more lightweight, but very quick to get up and running and easy to use. Also open source.

prodozoan · 12-12-2008, 07:55 AM

I just started with shopping carts.... I compared oscommerce and zen cart and went with zen cart owing to its simplicity and active user community.

I had a look at magento, it looked very neat but was concerned by the size of the site it churns out.

Warrior Simon · 12-12-2008, 08:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blase40

but this platform is the ****.

I guess 'the ****' is a good thing? (at least in this context)

blase40 · 12-12-2008, 08:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Konja

I guess 'the ****' is a good thing? (at least in this context)

Yes, in this context it is anyway

RBum78 · 12-12-2008, 08:26 AM

Is this good or bad?

sentient · 12-12-2008, 06:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blakekr

I have really wanted to use Magento, the first time I saw someone using it I HAD to find out what it was. It's a little tricky to set up, or was a few months ago. Also I'm not sure if it can handle dropshipping. But I agree, it's head and shoulders ahead of what else is out there, or so it seems.

Not entirely sure what you mean by handling dropshipping, but the site I run on magento is using a dropshipper. It's just the same as running any other ecommerce site.

The one caveat I'd give for Magento is that you should not expect any support whatsoever from the official Forum (in effect everyone is a newbie) and it's complicated enough to make it imperative that you hire a professional. Almost sounds intentional doesn't it, to drum up business. Perish the thought.

simonpiemon · 12-12-2008, 06:18 PM

I ran a site with oscommerce a few years ago, and spent thousands on cusomtization to get it to do what I needed it to, it did the job, in the end.

I'll certainly be looking elsewhere for the next site I need to build that needs a cart. Magento sounds cool, but some of you say it's easy to customize, and others say it's expensive. So which is it?

FrankRumbauskas · 12-12-2008, 06:55 PM

I really wanted to go with Magento after looking at it but unfortunately there is no recurring billing support, and as I sell all my products on 30-day free trials that was out.

I have modified X-Cart to handle 30-day trials (the recurring billing script was modified to only bill once). Problem though is integrating an affiliate script. I'm still stuck on 1shoppingcart for now since that's the only way I can sell on a 30-day deferred payment and have affiliates get credit when the charge goes through a month later.

Davegfx · 12-12-2008, 07:50 PM

Have any of you had experience with virtuemart - the addon for Joomla? I was looking at implementing it.

TelZilla · 12-12-2008, 08:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jeff Hope

Design can be tricky. Even after you've learned it, the files are located in two major directory structures many levels deep, and it can be a real pain looking for individual files to customize.

I checked out Magento several weeks ago for a friend, and while it is a robust system with a ton of features and fairly easy to setup, I just couldn't wrap my head around their template system.

Maybe I'm just being dense about it, but it almost seemed to be intentionally confusing for us non-designers.

Quentin · 12-12-2008, 10:49 PM

as mentioned before be careful as it is very resource hungry and many of the shared hosting companies don't like it for this reason and could cost you sales.

Quentin

FrankRumbauskas · 12-13-2008, 12:33 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Quentin

as mentioned before be careful as it is very resource hungry and many of the shared hosting companies don't like it for this reason and could cost you sales.

Even with a dedicated server I'd avoid anything that will slow my site down. Slow site = lost sales. Site load time is also now a major factor in AdWords quality score and I don't want my campaigns to get slapped because my site is slow!!!

Sirius Lin · 12-13-2008, 02:27 AM

I've had more trouble with OSCommerce than I care to list. This is one heck of a find indeed. Personally, I resorted to CRELoaded after fighting a losing battle with OSC.

~ Sirius

keywordguru · 12-13-2008, 04:16 AM

I have also been a big fan of osCommerce for many years. Can across Magneto a while back and was impressed, but still haven't turned out any projects with it. It has definitely broken the mold in a good way, and has changed in many ways I always wished osCommerce would without too much extra programming. Guess i'll have to load it up and test it out to see how it is.

I wonder what resources are required to run an ecommerce shop with thousands of products since osCommerce handled that quite easily.

Frostfire Gifts · 12-13-2008, 04:19 AM

I have used Actinic, but who are the other major players in mid range online commerce packages?

Talltom1 · 12-13-2008, 09:10 AM

Last time I checked, a month or two ago, Magento did not support digital downloads after purchase, which ruled it out for me...

TallTom

GeorgeO7 · 12-13-2008, 10:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Frostfire Gifts

I have used Actinic, but who are the other major players in mid range online commerce packages?

I've used the Interspire shopping cart (Google it) on several projects. One caveat... it is not free or cheap but blows away pretty much anything else on the market.

There are dozens of templates included.

Debbie Songster · 12-13-2008, 02:00 PM

The Magento cart does some cool things. I wish my zencart stores had a couple of those functions.

My tech says she has played with Magento and when I found this thread her and I have been IM'ing back and forth about it - pro's and con's

She says Magento is a resource hog and if you have 10 or more people on it at one time it bogs down - thats not good.

By the way, for those who have tried and suffered with OSC - don't let that affect your judgment on other shopping cart systems.
OSC is the bottom of the pile
Its also the easiest to hack - according to my tech

This is what she thinks about OSC - "and whomever uses OSC should have a bullet put in their head LOL. that is the most easily hackable store software out there"

Anyway, everyone has an opinion and of course its all speculation until you try it.
I might give it a try on my next store build.

Jeff - what are your clients saying about it? Are they finding it slows down when a lot of cutomers are on it?

Devan Koshal · 12-13-2008, 02:04 PM

It is a lovely piece of open source software.

momo4444 · 12-13-2008, 02:22 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by sentient

I use Prestashop for my other ecommerce stores - not as many features and more lightweight, but very quick to get up and running and easy to use. Also open source.

Magento is usually pretty slow, unless you have a dedicaated server.

I also found Prestashop to be a good alternative for smaller e-commerce sites.
Looks good and runs fast.

Most of the Prestashop forum is in French, so getting help casn be a little tricky.

Debbie Songster · 12-13-2008, 04:27 PM

Jeff
I spent a little time on their forum.
I saw someone had started a thread so individuals could post what they had done to help speed things up. There were several good points posted that people had success with.

The other thing I always check for is the ability to bulk upload product. It was not easy to find and I found numerous threads where others had the same question. I finally found the answer on someone else's blog post.
I see that you can bulk upload.

You mentioned the system slows down on concurrent check out.
I was wondering if you had experience with their multi store set up. Is the check out through the main store or is the check out with each individual store but you can access the admin through the main store.

I would think having multiple stores would help the traffic problem (as opposed to having all products in one store).

I have a dedicated server so I'm not worried about extra use of resources.

I think I'll install this cart and play with it. I have another store on my schedule to build. I'm going to use this and see how it works.

Thomas Belknap · 12-13-2008, 05:57 PM

No downloadable products as of yet. They state it will be out at the end of this year.

I think the main problem is their database design. That is what causes a lot of the resource problems. It takes a lot of sql statements to get any type of information out of that database.

I worked on a similar database design for a big insurance company. It was a pain in the arse.

If you want to customize it, coding wise, it will be a pretty nice size learning experience. I think they have an api which may make it easier. I just know from experience how hard the database design will make learning to customize it more difficult.

Debbie Songster · 12-13-2008, 06:22 PM

I'm interested in their multi store function although I don't have a lot of customers that shop in more than one of my stores. Now that I know how its tied together I can see how it would slow to a snails pace with multiple checkouts happening at the same time.

I think I will stick with self contained individual stores.
I'm still going to use it for the next store - I want to test it out.

That will give me a chance to compare "new store" stats as I kept pretty detailed records on the last store build as far as rate of indexing with the search engines and keyword ranking.
That was a Zencart build so it will be interesting to see how they compare.

Most of the time I just turn my tech loose on the templates (although the last store was completely my build). I usually get her to do that which saves me time and while she works on the template I work on the products. When we were chatting today about it, she said she felt confident she could do a custom template for it.

If I hate it, you guys will probably "hear" me grumble about it here. LOL

I would love to hear of anyone else's experiences with it.

sentient · 12-13-2008, 06:24 PM

The database is the big problem, as you've said Thomas. My site sells products from a dropshipper supplier, who provides an XML feed for product updates, so in theory I just need to do my meta tags and marketing. But I can't find anyone to match the feeds up to the database, as it's so complex (and I'm not a programmer), so for me it's manual process every day updating the products (it's a clothing site, so you can imagine sizes and colours going in and out of stock every day).

SamLewi · 01-26-2009, 07:15 PM

many of my developers have also told me about the inefficiencies and resource hungry solutions out there. they all recommend interspire now.

Debbie Songster · 01-26-2009, 07:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by SamLewi

many of my developers have also told me about the inefficiencies and resource hungry solutions out there. they all recommend interspire now.

Doing a little self promotion are ya?
At $1700 I'll keep the shopping carts I have - thanks

You might want to edit your post and the other one you made (saying the same thing) so you are contributing something useful.

GeorgeO7 · 01-26-2009, 08:52 PM

Hi Debbie,

I hope you were not referring to me as being SamLewi.

I am not.

Originally Posted by SamLewi http://www.warriorforum.com/images/buttons/viewpost.gif
many of my developers have also told me about the inefficiencies and resource hungry solutions out there. they all recommend interspire now.

"Doing a little self promotion are ya?

At $1700 I'll keep the shopping carts I have - thanks"

I bought a license while it was still in beta and loved the software though it is expensive. You will note I did not provide a link to Interspire but for those who were interested suggested that they Google it.

I played with Magento and found it awkward to work with as well as very slow.

George

Dave777 · 01-26-2009, 08:52 PM

In case some may have missed a good review on Magento! I posted the following regarding Magento in a few other related threads. Sounds great in the video if you know what you're doing...

The PeC Review: Magento Is the Open Source Powerhouse | Practical eCommerce

Dave

dug · 05-28-2009, 08:22 AM

Hi guys! I see almost everyone here is a fan of Magento. I hope those who are also interested to switch to this shopping cart will find this info useful. I guess you also know what moving to different shopping cart is - it's quite a pain.

Recently i came around a web service cart2cart. that automates data transfer. Maybe it will help somebody.

CBSnooper · 05-28-2009, 09:17 AM

I ran my bricks and mortar business using OSCommerce. I managed to get to the top of Google for my two word phrase which conveys what the store sells. It took a lot of effort and SEO optimisation. Yes, OSC is badly written and difficult to implement new themes and layouts without a lot of code hacking, but I took over $500,000 worth of orders using it, and customers did say it was an easy site to use.

I did look at Magento when I first saw it some months back, and thought 'wow I'll give that a shot'. Unfortunately I couldn't install it as my host wasnt running php5 and something else it needs.

@DaveGFX - I have installed Virtuemart for a Joomla site. It's good, but quite often it won't let people add a product to the cart and has a 'call for price' message. It's usually down to cookies. Get them to clear them out and it's ok. I only have a dozen or so items on, each with different sizes and but works ok.

nicalyngroup · 05-28-2009, 03:16 PM

Does anyone have any experience with AbleCommerce? While not free, it does appear to have a ton of functionality and from what others have said it is one of the top carts out there. I would be interested in any feedback about it. Thanks!

Sean

ztrek · 05-31-2009, 06:37 AM

One big problem I had with Zen Cart was different shipping charges for different dropshippers. Does Magento handle this easily?

TheRealDomainer · 05-31-2009, 07:15 AM

This look pretty cool man.
Thanks for sharing

swissmark · 06-04-2009, 02:07 PM

I'll give it a try... Since I'm not a big fan of oscommerce I hope magento will do the trick.

Droopy Dawg · 06-04-2009, 02:24 PM

I am a ColdFusion developer... where could I get some kind of tutorial to make carts like these work in a non-CF environment?

Thanks in advanced.

DeShon

12-12-2008, 01:14 AM	#1
blase40 www.justinblase.com War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: South Dakota Posts: 511 Thanks: 16 Thanked 28 Times in 16 Posts Social Networking	Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I have been using OsCommerce for one of my e-commerce sites for the past couple years and it has treated me fairly well. Considering it is open source with a decent variety of contributions available, I have been able to accomplish most of things I have wanted to with it. But then..... I set up newest store with Magento. I must say, I haven't spent more than a month or so with it, so I am sure there will be a few things I run into that will be slight drawbacks... but this platform is the ****. Are there any other Magento users here? I would love to hear your thoughts. Especially those that have been using OsCommerce or ZenCart for years. I have in recent months become sick and tired of the "clunkiness" of OsCommerce. From an SEO standpoint I also found it to be a bad platform, no matter how many contributions I utilized. For those of you that are not familiar, check out the Magento site. Its also completely free and open source just like OSC. Magento - Video Tour of Magento - eCommerce Software for Growth, Powered by Open Source

12-12-2008, 01:24 AM	#2
Mike Hill List Building Freedom War Room Member Join Date: Jun 2004 Posts: 2,611 Blog Entries: 3 Thanks: 249 Thanked 668 Times in 330 Posts Social Networking	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Holy cow that's pretty cool software... I had no idea you could find this caliber in Open Source Great find! Mike Hill

12-12-2008, 01:30 AM	#3
jbreezy HyperActive Warrior Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 121 Thanks: 2 Thanked 7 Times in 5 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Looks pretty solid..how easy was it to change templates and customize design?

12-12-2008, 01:33 AM	#4
freudianslip27 Senior Warrior Member War Room Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 1,315 Thanks: 26 Thanked 176 Times in 116 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Looks pretty cool. I haven't used oscommerce for a while but will definitely be checking this out as I will have a need for it in the future. It is amazing how much open source can offer. Just take a look at WordPress. Matt

12-12-2008, 01:42 AM	#5
Gail Sober Advanced Warrior Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: U.S.A. Posts: 741 Thanks: 59 Thanked 45 Times in 37 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Looking forward to playing with it. Fingers crossed that it can set pricing by length/width on the fly.

12-12-2008, 01:50 AM	#6
tommygadget Banned War Room Member Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Up North, USA Posts: 2,517 Blog Entries: 11 Thanks: 88 Thanked 288 Times in 157 Posts Social Networking	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... OSCommerce killed my business because after years online, Google did not know what I was selling. What an SEO nightmare. At the time I did not know that I was getting NO organic traffic because I chose the wrong software. When I realized it, I had a customized setup that would break with the slightest change and so was stuck with it to the bitter end. TomG. - Magenta looks very nice IMO.

12-12-2008, 03:19 AM	#7
blakekr Active Warrior Join Date: Apr 2004 Location: , , USA. Posts: 34 Thanks: 3 Thanked 2 Times in 2 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I have really wanted to use Magento, the first time I saw someone using it I HAD to find out what it was. It's a little tricky to set up, or was a few months ago. Also I'm not sure if it can handle dropshipping. But I agree, it's head and shoulders ahead of what else is out there, or so it seems.

12-12-2008, 04:47 AM	#8
Mike Bogowski Puppet Master Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Sydney, Australia. Posts: 628 Thanks: 7 Thanked 62 Times in 18 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Agreed! oscommerce is junk, its a clunky app and horribly written! The plus is that Magento is built on the Zend Framework so its sooooooo easy to customize and add to.

12-12-2008, 06:21 AM	#9
Jeffery Senior Warrior Member War Room Member Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Florida Posts: 2,948 Thanks: 134 Thanked 92 Times in 66 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... It is good, but it should only be used on a Dedicated or VPS if the site will be a moderate or busy site. Some shared hosts with low-end servers will not allow Magneto because of the high resources. Jeffery 100% :-)

12-12-2008, 07:01 AM	#10
sentient HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 321 Thanks: 83 Thanked 39 Times in 35 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Hi I use Magento for one of my ecomerce stores: Not sure if I'm allowed to post a link so to play it safe I won't. It's fantastic considering it's "free", in that it is robust and has a huge amount of functionality and features. The problems come with customisation. It has a complicated database which isn't the easiest to manipulate. I've outsourced mine to people in Vietnam and Romania, but it's still cost me a few hundred dollars. So very good, but not completely free. I use Prestashop for my other ecommerce stores - not as many features and more lightweight, but very quick to get up and running and easy to use. Also open source.

12-12-2008, 07:55 AM	#11
prodozoan HyperActive Warrior Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: , , India. Posts: 147 Thanks: 7 Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I just started with shopping carts.... I compared oscommerce and zen cart and went with zen cart owing to its simplicity and active user community. I had a look at magento, it looked very neat but was concerned by the size of the site it churns out.

12-12-2008, 08:26 AM	#14
RBum78 Active Warrior Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 96 Thanks: 14 Thanked 3 Times in 3 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Is this good or bad?

12-12-2008, 06:18 PM	#16
simonpiemon Active Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Bournemouth, UK Posts: 35 Thanks: 4 Thanked 7 Times in 7 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I ran a site with oscommerce a few years ago, and spent thousands on cusomtization to get it to do what I needed it to, it did the job, in the end. I'll certainly be looking elsewhere for the next site I need to build that needs a cart. Magento sounds cool, but some of you say it's easy to customize, and others say it's expensive. So which is it?

12-12-2008, 06:55 PM	#17
FrankRumbauskas HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 180 Thanks: 4 Thanked 46 Times in 36 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I really wanted to go with Magento after looking at it but unfortunately there is no recurring billing support, and as I sell all my products on 30-day free trials that was out. I have modified X-Cart to handle 30-day trials (the recurring billing script was modified to only bill once). Problem though is integrating an affiliate script. I'm still stuck on 1shoppingcart for now since that's the only way I can sell on a 30-day deferred payment and have affiliates get credit when the charge goes through a month later.

12-12-2008, 07:50 PM	#18
Davegfx Zulu Design Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2008 Location: Vancouver, BC Posts: 65 Thanks: 26 Thanked 9 Times in 6 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Have any of you had experience with virtuemart - the addon for Joomla? I was looking at implementing it.

12-12-2008, 10:49 PM	#20
Quentin DIY Internet Marketing War Room Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Brisbane Posts: 4,918 Blog Entries: 10 Thanks: 7 Thanked 990 Times in 449 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... as mentioned before be careful as it is very resource hungry and many of the shared hosting companies don't like it for this reason and could cost you sales. Quentin

12-13-2008, 02:27 AM	#22
Sirius Lin Free Stuff - see my sig! War Room Member Join Date: Dec 2006 Location: Singapore. Posts: 1,082 Thanks: 10 Thanked 16 Times in 14 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I've had more trouble with OSCommerce than I care to list. This is one heck of a find indeed. Personally, I resorted to CRELoaded after fighting a losing battle with OSC. ~ Sirius

12-13-2008, 04:16 AM	#23
keywordguru Advanced Warrior Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: , , USA. Posts: 980 Thanks: 0 Thanked 2 Times in 2 Posts Social Networking	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I have also been a big fan of osCommerce for many years. Can across Magneto a while back and was impressed, but still haven't turned out any projects with it. It has definitely broken the mold in a good way, and has changed in many ways I always wished osCommerce would without too much extra programming. Guess i'll have to load it up and test it out to see how it is. I wonder what resources are required to run an ecommerce shop with thousands of products since osCommerce handled that quite easily.

12-13-2008, 04:19 AM	#24
Frostfire Gifts Warrior Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 6 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I have used Actinic, but who are the other major players in mid range online commerce packages?

12-13-2008, 09:10 AM	#25
Talltom1 HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Detroit, MI Posts: 444 Thanks: 34 Thanked 75 Times in 31 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Last time I checked, a month or two ago, Magento did not support digital downloads after purchase, which ruled it out for me... TallTom

12-13-2008, 02:00 PM	#27
Debbie Songster Songster Shops War Room Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: , Arizona , USA. Posts: 969 Blog Entries: 19 Thanks: 93 Thanked 178 Times in 86 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... The Magento cart does some cool things. I wish my zencart stores had a couple of those functions. My tech says she has played with Magento and when I found this thread her and I have been IM'ing back and forth about it - pro's and con's She says Magento is a resource hog and if you have 10 or more people on it at one time it bogs down - thats not good. By the way, for those who have tried and suffered with OSC - don't let that affect your judgment on other shopping cart systems. OSC is the bottom of the pile Its also the easiest to hack - according to my tech This is what she thinks about OSC - "and whomever uses OSC should have a bullet put in their head LOL. that is the most easily hackable store software out there" Anyway, everyone has an opinion and of course its all speculation until you try it. I might give it a try on my next store build. Jeff - what are your clients saying about it? Are they finding it slows down when a lot of cutomers are on it?

12-13-2008, 02:04 PM	#28
Devan Koshal Designer/Developer War Room Member Join Date: Sep 2008 Posts: 374 Thanks: 29 Thanked 12 Times in 10 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... It is a lovely piece of open source software.

12-13-2008, 04:27 PM	#30
Debbie Songster Songster Shops War Room Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: , Arizona , USA. Posts: 969 Blog Entries: 19 Thanks: 93 Thanked 178 Times in 86 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Jeff I spent a little time on their forum. I saw someone had started a thread so individuals could post what they had done to help speed things up. There were several good points posted that people had success with. The other thing I always check for is the ability to bulk upload product. It was not easy to find and I found numerous threads where others had the same question. I finally found the answer on someone else's blog post. I see that you can bulk upload. You mentioned the system slows down on concurrent check out. I was wondering if you had experience with their multi store set up. Is the check out through the main store or is the check out with each individual store but you can access the admin through the main store. I would think having multiple stores would help the traffic problem (as opposed to having all products in one store). I have a dedicated server so I'm not worried about extra use of resources. I think I'll install this cart and play with it. I have another store on my schedule to build. I'm going to use this and see how it works.

12-13-2008, 05:57 PM	#31
Thomas Belknap Mr. Cueball War Room Member Join Date: Sep 2006 Location: , , . Posts: 4,507 Thanks: 196 Thanked 1,188 Times in 590 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... No downloadable products as of yet. They state it will be out at the end of this year. I think the main problem is their database design. That is what causes a lot of the resource problems. It takes a lot of sql statements to get any type of information out of that database. I worked on a similar database design for a big insurance company. It was a pain in the arse. If you want to customize it, coding wise, it will be a pretty nice size learning experience. I think they have an api which may make it easier. I just know from experience how hard the database design will make learning to customize it more difficult.

12-13-2008, 06:22 PM	#32
Debbie Songster Songster Shops War Room Member Join Date: Mar 2007 Location: , Arizona , USA. Posts: 969 Blog Entries: 19 Thanks: 93 Thanked 178 Times in 86 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I'm interested in their multi store function although I don't have a lot of customers that shop in more than one of my stores. Now that I know how its tied together I can see how it would slow to a snails pace with multiple checkouts happening at the same time. I think I will stick with self contained individual stores. I'm still going to use it for the next store - I want to test it out. That will give me a chance to compare "new store" stats as I kept pretty detailed records on the last store build as far as rate of indexing with the search engines and keyword ranking. That was a Zencart build so it will be interesting to see how they compare. Most of the time I just turn my tech loose on the templates (although the last store was completely my build). I usually get her to do that which saves me time and while she works on the template I work on the products. When we were chatting today about it, she said she felt confident she could do a custom template for it. If I hate it, you guys will probably "hear" me grumble about it here. LOL I would love to hear of anyone else's experiences with it.

12-13-2008, 06:24 PM	#33
sentient HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Nov 2008 Posts: 321 Thanks: 83 Thanked 39 Times in 35 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... The database is the big problem, as you've said Thomas. My site sells products from a dropshipper supplier, who provides an XML feed for product updates, so in theory I just need to do my meta tags and marketing. But I can't find anyone to match the feeds up to the database, as it's so complex (and I'm not a programmer), so for me it's manual process every day updating the products (it's a clothing site, so you can imagine sizes and colours going in and out of stock every day).

01-26-2009, 07:15 PM	#34
SamLewi Active Warrior Join Date: Jan 2009 Posts: 78 Thanks: 0 Thanked 2 Times in 2 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... many of my developers have also told me about the inefficiencies and resource hungry solutions out there. they all recommend interspire now.

01-26-2009, 08:52 PM	#36
GeorgeO7 Just call me George War Room Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Minnesota Posts: 147 Thanks: 30 Thanked 26 Times in 22 Posts Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Hi Debbie, I hope you were not referring to me as being SamLewi. I am not. Originally Posted by SamLewi http://www.warriorforum.com/images/buttons/viewpost.gif many of my developers have also told me about the inefficiencies and resource hungry solutions out there. they all recommend interspire now. "Doing a little self promotion are ya? At $1700 I'll keep the shopping carts I have - thanks" I bought a license while it was still in beta and loved the software though it is expensive. You will note I did not provide a link to Interspire but for those who were interested suggested that they Google it. I played with Magento and found it awkward to work with as well as very slow. George

01-26-2009, 08:52 PM	#37
Dave777 Advanced Warrior Join Date: May 2008 Location: Western Canada Posts: 824 Thanks: 29 Thanked 149 Times in 127 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... In case some may have missed a good review on Magento! I posted the following regarding Magento in a few other related threads. Sounds great in the video if you know what you're doing... The PeC Review: Magento Is the Open Source Powerhouse \| Practical eCommerce Dave

05-28-2009, 08:22 AM	#38
dug Warrior Member Join Date: May 2009 Posts: 3 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Hi guys! I see almost everyone here is a fan of Magento. I hope those who are also interested to switch to this shopping cart will find this info useful. I guess you also know what moving to different shopping cart is - it's quite a pain. Recently i came around a web service cart2cart. that automates data transfer. Maybe it will help somebody.

05-28-2009, 09:17 AM	#39
CBSnooper HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: May 2009 Location: Bradford, UK Posts: 204 Thanks: 17 Thanked 31 Times in 26 Posts Social Networking	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I ran my bricks and mortar business using OSCommerce. I managed to get to the top of Google for my two word phrase which conveys what the store sells. It took a lot of effort and SEO optimisation. Yes, OSC is badly written and difficult to implement new themes and layouts without a lot of code hacking, but I took over $500,000 worth of orders using it, and customers did say it was an easy site to use. I did look at Magento when I first saw it some months back, and thought 'wow I'll give that a shot'. Unfortunately I couldn't install it as my host wasnt running php5 and something else it needs. @DaveGFX - I have installed Virtuemart for a Joomla site. It's good, but quite often it won't let people add a product to the cart and has a 'call for price' message. It's usually down to cookies. Get them to clear them out and it's ok. I only have a dozen or so items on, each with different sizes and but works ok.

05-28-2009, 03:16 PM	#40
nicalyngroup HyperActive Warrior War Room Member Join Date: Jan 2009 Location: Medina, OH Posts: 100 Thanks: 31 Thanked 8 Times in 8 Posts Social Networking	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... Does anyone have any experience with AbleCommerce? While not free, it does appear to have a ton of functionality and from what others have said it is one of the top carts out there. I would be interested in any feedback about it. Thanks! Sean

05-31-2009, 06:37 AM	#41
ztrek Active Warrior Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Manistee, MI, USA Posts: 43 Thanks: 0 Thanked 2 Times in 2 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... One big problem I had with Zen Cart was different shipping charges for different dropshippers. Does Magento handle this easily?

05-31-2009, 07:15 AM	#42
TheRealDomainer Banned Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: , , USA. Posts: 459 Thanks: 9 Thanked 61 Times in 29 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... This look pretty cool man. Thanks for sharing

06-04-2009, 02:07 PM	#43
swissmark Warrior Member War Room Member Join Date: Dec 2008 Posts: 25 Blog Entries: 1 Thanks: 2 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Social Networking Contact Info	Re: Bye Bye OsCommerce.... I have a new love... I'll give it a try... Since I'm not a big fan of oscommerce I hope magento will do the trick.