If you had the ability to choose between Magento, Miva, osC, ZenCart - which would you choose. Each one, by my reckoning has great value and I am having issues deciding which to use. What I like about each:
Magento: graphically pleasing, multiple stores in one store, ajax, easy to customize
Miva: very robust and well documented
osC: great support community, somewhat easy to design around, user friendly
Zen: same as osC but better with features and easier to use
Beyond that, I would like to use ‘the one’ for a solution for other clients so it has to be a business decision as well.
Actually, we don’t have PayQuake anymore. We had to remove it due to it wasn’t popular among X-Cart powered merchants. We removed many rarely used payment gateway integrations to reduce our efforts on their support and concentrated on development of a PA-DSS compliant solution for credit card processing. I am sure you know about the 1st of July - PA-DSS deadline set by VISA and PCI council.
I am sorry to hear that. Let me assume you used an old version (we released v4.4 recently) or X-Cart isn’t a good fit for your project indeed. That’s normal actually. Every business has its own requirements. That’s why many e-commerce solution out there nowadays!
Agreed! Important is that we need to know which sites used which scripts that are successful right now and there are lots of gorgeous gzencart-based stores:
I am going to give Magento a whirl pretty soon. I am still trying to get my head around a few things. I think given what you can do style wise with Magento that it is probably the way to go. It could be a bit further along in the development process for my liking but I am pretty impressed with it so far. That is some pretty slick stuff.
Magento is very graphically pleasing, but don’t just jump in because of the pretty backend. Magento is still very young, but if you are comfortable with the OOP approach and specifically the Zend Framework setup that they have, Magento could turn out to be a great cart for you.
Miva is very robust, but FAR from well documented. Recently purchased, the new owners (who were actually the former owners) claim that this will be fixed soon. While the community is very active, every modification you want to make will cost you $20-$100.
osC is dieing. Version 3 has been “in progress” forever now, and Magento has really tried to replace osC as the #1 open source cart.
Zen is a pretty good cart and is still very active. The infrastructure is similar to osC, but very different than Magento’s. Zen relies on “hacks” more than “addons”, which can be very, very messy.
My $.02 (I’ve used Miva a lot, Magento some (never live), and Zen a little)
Miva is proprietary and proprietary is crap.
Magento is bloatware without some very key features.
OSC is convoluted and mess.
Zen-cart is just OSC that someone has attempted to straighten out.
I’ve used, or attempted to use, all 4.
Try Cubecart instead, which I like, and next I plan to try Avactis if they give me the free evaluation copy they said they would. It also looks decent.
Can you elaborate on why Magento is bloatware? What key features is it lacking? I’m seriously considering using it for a large project, and I’d like to make the right choice before doing all of that work. Is it not as easy to design for as it claims?
I’ve used Avactis, and I really like how easy it was to implement into my design. Their forum isn’t very active, but I was able to get it running fine. My needs for that site were fairly basic. I also got the free copy and am wondering if I should use it for my larger project or try out Magento.
Magneto is slower than an oscommerce site, loaded with products. And thats very slow. Its why the trend back in 2005 was to go with CSS/XHTML php carts like Zen cart, instead of table based carts like Osc.
Magneto is nice in the way that web based flash applications are nice- it is packed full of great features that run like a snail unless you spend a fortune on specialized web hostng.
Also, the template is inflexible in critical ways, such as altering the nav bar to be a side menu intead of a top nav bar. There are also some key bugs in the bulk-uploader (if you like to manage stock via a spreadsheet)
I love it for what it was trying to do, but its slow and buggy `bloatware’
Having worked with Magento extensively on 10+ sites now, I can say with confidence that it’s not really ready for the mainstream yet. It IS bulky and slow, and pretty much requires a dedicated server to run (you don’t even want to try it in a shared hosting environment). The real WTF moment for me was dealing with their templating system, and the fact that all their add to cart/checkout buttons won’t work AT ALL with javascript disabled.
The good news is that the development progress on it seems very active, and they will no doubt address the (huge) performance concerns at some point in time. And when they DO solve those performance problems (and other little “gotchas” like javascript issues), the software will be almost unbeatable.
The live sites that I’ve seen don’t seem like they run any faster than my Avactis site. Does that mean they’re on a dedicated server or that both are slow? Sorry, I don’t mean to hijack this thread. I appreciate the clarification on Magento. I want to build a site with about 500 products. Does the number of product affect the site’s speed?
Wikid, you’re currently unable to upload products via CSV file?
I’ve also used X-Cart and decided not to try OsC after those horrible experiences with X-Cart’s templating system.
Czaries, to get back to the OP’s post, which software would you recommend? Would you recommend using Magento after 1.1 is released?
That was something that I mentioned early on in the beta process. Magento said they didn’t know how to do their checkout any other way. Its an obvious example of developers working backwards and caring more about their feature set than being stable and usable. Make it work without JavaScript first, then enhance. Its the same logic behind writing HTML before you use CSS
Yes, the problem is images don’t bulk upload. The bug hadn’t been fixed last I time looked (a month ago) and it was reported last year. Bulk listing and managing products in a spreadsheet are important to me, but maybe not to others with small inventories.
