Magento... the way to go? Or

Business
1

Ok guys, Im torn here… Been reading for months now.

I’m in the wholesale business. I’m selling a wide range of sizes of items either on pallets or individual boxes, depending on what they buy. Also With quantity bundle pricing.

But the more I read, the more I get lost, a complete paradox, I know.

Because certain carts offer X featuers, but doesn’t offer Y feature or Vice versa. Then other carts have terrible reviews… Oh great!

I’ve read the features on various carts. They all look promising and amazing. such as:

X-Cart - A lot of great features. Have not seen a demo yet though.

CS-Cart - Really good reviews. I need to read a bit more on this though.

Interspire - I played with the demo and it looks great! But reviews are scary.

Miva Merchant - I saw some sample of sites and they good.

Magento - Lots of bells and whistles, but again. Bad reviews!

Here’s my understanding though. Because they all have almost all the bells and whistles, either through Add-ons or whatever, I’m leaning more towards Magento because of my programmer / web designer.

My programmer, a friend, works with Magento mainly. He’s offering me a good deal on a new designed site with this cart because he’s more familiar with this cart and also feels more comfortable.

How do you guys feel about Magento? Or do you prefer the other mentioned Carts that I posted above.

Thank you,

PS: these are important features needed. the rest I can read and understand for myself. But most of them doesn’t list if this these are offered.

  1. Customers may choose to bill their own UPS or FedEx account - Or - Customer pick up with terms acceptance window regarding location availability verification requirement, etc.

  2. Combined item quantities will result in volume discount. (Bundle pricing) – I know Interspire and Magento have this feature.

  3. Freight dimension calculators or freight quotes for boxes, items on pallet, etc.

  4. Members can be assigned other means of payments, such as Net Terms(billed), Cash on Pick up, Company Check, Wire, Etc.

Thanks again.

2

I used all of these:

X-Cart - A lot of great features. Have not seen a demo yet though.

CS-Cart - Really good reviews. I need to read a bit more on this though.

Interspire - I played with the demo and it looks great! But reviews are scary.

Miva Merchant - I saw some sample of sites and they good.

I did not go live with x-cart. I am currently using cs-cart. I tried going live with Interspire and dropped it after a month and wasted a ton of money and time. I had a Miva Merchant store for 7+ years. They all have their pros and cons. I do think Miva Merchant is a strong cart. They have lots of modules you can use to customize the cart. I think they are kind of old school there but that is just my impression of hanging around with that community for so long and not getting the new features I needed. (They also don’t have an online demo - I told them I’d be onto the next cart in 2 sec if I didn’t already have experience with MM. They are going to get me a login so I can demo the latest version.)

CS-cart has some issues but I am very happy with it overall and I have had custom work done directly with cs-cart to get the functionality I need and they are very easy to work with and work is done at a very reasonable cost.

Until now I have done downloads only so I am not familiar with the shipping options. Maybe you could ask at each of the cart’s forums about the requirements you need and you can get more specific details.

Magento looks great but I am turned off by the high “enterprise” price. (I would most likely need that version.) Interspire has high recurring licensing fees which I think are overpriced for what you get. I was burned by them so it scares me to work with another company who has an enterprise price structure.

3

I highly doubt that you’ll find a cart which has this feature build in. It will have to be custom coded. Overall, it will most likely be more cost effective to have it custom coded for a cart based on the osCommerce family. Your best bet is CRE B2B as a base. Any version, 6.2 or higher will do.

4

Thank you for your input,

So what exactly was the problem with Interspire? I played with the back end it seemed cool. But the demos all looked sort of lame. Can they be customized to look spiffy like the big popular sites?

CS-Cart does look promising. However my Programmer has not worked with CS-Cart and so would most likely charge more because of the lurning curve and the time.

Why would you / or one need the Enterprise version of Magento? The extra features on the Enterprise is basically for the Tech Support… Atleast from what I understood, I could be wrong. The one feature that I thought seemed important was the Administrative Roles that you can set for the employees.

5

Interesting…Administrative Access levels has been out since '03 and is something that comes prebuild with CRE version 6.1A and up and oscMax, probably zencart and cs-cart too and dozens of others. Basically osCommerce + http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/1359

6

I could not agree with you more. I was seriously baffled by this. Why in the world, would they not integrate that feature? That just means the Employer has to do more monotonous work than the Employees. Now I feel a bit unsave to give the passwords to my Employees because I don’t want them to have access to Credit Cards, Revenues, or making adjustments to the site that may cause some critical damage.

How silly.

Ah oh well, I couldn’t imagine that lasting much longer.