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

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

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

Looking forward to playing with it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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% :-)

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.

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

Is this good or bad?

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

TallTom

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?

It is a lovely piece of open source software.

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.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

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.

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

This look pretty cool man.
Thanks for sharing

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

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