eCommerce

Anyone have an online store built into their community were you sell physical items that are shipped to the customer?

If so, have you worked with Magento?

In the past, I have worked with OSCommerce but there is no dedication to developing that software. Version 3.0 has been in development for the better part of a decade with no visible progress. There have been several forks including Zen-cart and CubeCart but I find them to be chaotic and self-serving. The code for these forks seems a little chaotic and mashed together. Again that is just my opinion. If they work for you that is great.

Most recently, I have used X-Cart. Not only is it an expensive application it is also confusing in ways and limiting in others. Being a commercial application it does come with official support but that is sporadic at best.

So I have been looking at Magento for a community ecommerce project that I have coming up. Wondering if you have any thoughts on it. Not looking at the Enterprise version mind you, just the Open Source version. I don't have $9,000 a year for licensing the Enterprise version.

 

I really want to do this on a couple of my vB forums, but I want a shopping cart that can handle both physical items and downloaded ones. Haven't seen any that would do both yet.

 

X-cart can handle both physical products and digital downloads. It is not really worth the $115.00 for a license though as its fairly hard to customize though. However I haven't used it for about 3 years so they could have improved that.

Oscommerce can as well but I wouldn't recommend using it. Its cumbersome and difficult to customize to say the least. As stated above, it showed promise back in 2001 but it hasn't really seen any improvements since then.

I haven't used Magento myself yet. It looks like and interesting package though. I just downloaded it to see what it can do. Have seen commercial and free templates for it so hopefully its easy to customize.

 

I'd love to have an integrated eCommerce with Setsou Design and Bird is the Word.

Having T-shirts, Hats, Pens, Key Rings and other items would be cool and could generate serious revenue.

I'll see, though.

 

I received an interesting e-mail asking me if I wanted to design shirts for them. I was quite interested with the offer.

 

For Magento? Wow. That's great! :thumbup:

 

Definitely!

Did you accept the offer?

 

No, it was a random e-mail... I think... ut uhh, I told them no. I don't have time for HUGE projects at the moment due to college.

 

I understand.

 

Zen Cart also does both types of items.

But I agree X-Cart is so much better as a shopping cart.

 

Unfortunately $115 is a little steep for a shop that I'm mainly going to sell buttons and various printable goodies in