How has Magento worked for your business? Do you find it is easy to find plug ins and payment modules? How hard has it been for you to customize the template? I am just curious because lately Magento has been looking cool to me.
OS commerce was a pain to work with. It doesn’t give many expansions for flexibility. I was to create a selection of hybrid items that are both products and product attributes. I’m sure that Magento’s complex item and taxonomy system for products would’ve let you do this with ease.
Magento customization is intense, but I would take it one step at a time. I decided to work exclusively with .phtml templates for several weeks before trying my hand at custom XML files.
Ahh yes cool … magento is good but you will be needing a FAST nice hosting whn I say fast it means really FAST 
magento is good to use and you can play around a bit in it… quite hard for newbies!
i am currently getting a developer to build a magento shopping cart to replace my old OSCommerce cart. Issues which crop up would be:
- data migration would be a problems as the tables are very different
- it seemed customization in magento has to follow certain rules and not as freestyle as OScommerce.
- May have problems with 301 redirect to maintain similar urls from old cart.
- After customization, future magento updates may not be as easy as one-click button.
Am still pressing on with Magento after reading of its good Search engine friendly features and its online marketing features.
Greenpiper
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I’m using http://www.nublue.co.uk/ for my hosting. I picked them because I wanted UK based hosting and had heard good reports.
They seem to have changed their packages and I can’t see the one which I am using on their site anymore. It is shared and seems similar to the s10 package:
http://www.nublue.co.uk/web-hosting/shared
well a person should be smart enough to handle it… I know it’s not too much user friendly and it cannot be in future too … as because of the amount of features they trying to offer … but it takes a lot of system resources and if you own a store I better suggest you to get your own dedicated server … even VPS will not fix anything!
Long learning curve is not the only issue.
Magento might work only if you are medium to large (enterprise) ecommerce site. In this case you do have dedicated services and application it is scalable to any requirements. Need to have team of developers
For small business magento is too much.
magento needs too resource of server…
not recommended
I am working with Magento last 11 month. From my experience I learn that Magento is leading e-commerce software. But it’s true Magento takes more resource.
What kind of affiliate program you need? ShareASale integration, ClixGalore or something custom?
What hosting you use with your store? Dedicated server?
I’ve been using Magento on my store which I opened 2 months ago:
http://twistedtime.com
It really is a steep learning curve (the comic above sums it up perfectly). However, now that I have got my head around it I love it and find it to be super powerful. I don’t regret using it for a second. If you have time to play around with it then I’d go for it. Though if you want something up and running pretty quickly with a custom theme then I wouldn’t recommend it.
There are a log of extensions. However, few of them are free.
Magento has nice shipping features as well. There is also this free affiliate extension (I’ve never used it though):
Haha that is how it has been with my current cart, CS-Cart. The thing is the cart has an affiliate program built in and fancy shipping features too.