Hi Can anyone tell me which one of these two open source ecommerce bundles is the best suited for e commerce sites? Magento or Oscommerce?
Unsure of which is best but i think Magento requires a dedicated server or at least some sort of specialist hosting, i may be wrong though.
Magento is far most customizable and is a much more complete platform. It is far more advanced than oscommerce.
Hey, Magneto has far more features than OSCommerce, the only downside is that it runs slightly slower in the latest release and that there is not many free theme/template resources available - you either have to make it yourself, or pay someone to do it for you. It includes some very advanced features, including integrating with Worldpay, Paypal, NoChex, Google Checkout and the likes, plus some handy features such as printable monthly/years sales reports. Magneto should work fine on Shared hosting, you do not need a dedicated server to be able to run it, however, you do need some PHP extensions such as mcrypt, gd, simplexml and also need InnoDB engine enabled on MySQL. You can find out if Magneto will work on your server by using this OSCommerce is fine if you're making a small online store, as there is plenty of free resources and help available to guide you through setting up your store. If you have the option, I would use Magneto. Regards, Steve
I would have to disagree there. The sheer number of user contributions via the oscommerce website make it one of the most diverse free ecommerce applications out there. I would certainly vouch for osCommerce as an effective platform for an ecommerce website.
There is a very interesting article here; http://blog.web-translations.com/the-internet/ecommerce-wars-magento-vs-oscommerce/631
I tried to put it as best I could, but I guess it came out wrong. I was talking about Magneto when I said there isn't many free resources available, their store has thousands of mods/themes/plugins but you will have to pay for 90% of them. Sorry for the confusion. I don't know if in that article tried they tried the latest release, as it was posted four months ago but some of the things listed in the comparison table doesn't add up. I wouldn't trust what's been posted by someone on a blog no matter who they are, they could be biased/work for either company or generally haven't tested both packages to their full potential. The only real way you will find out which is the better one is by trying both of them and making your decision based upon that. The cheaper solution would be OSCommerce, however my personal preference would now be Magneto. Regards, Steve
Thanks for clarifying! I'll have to get myself a few Magento gigs so it can pay for my training on the software. As someone who has worked extensively with oscommerce I can tell you there are a lot of things I would have done differently if I had been building the application. 1 thing, which I still can't believe, is that there is not a class for products. I've made this modification to a few of the sites I've worked on and it's made future modifications far easier to install.
Hi, I would prefer Magento because most things that Magento development can do out-of-the-box you need plugins for OSCommerce (resulting a load of compatibility errors), or some things OSCommerce that just can't do.
I build modifications for osCommerce and haven't been asked to complete a project which wasn't possible yet. (and I've been asked to complete some tricky projects) I think it's a lot of rubbish to say that the plugins for osCommerce cause compatibility errors. Yes there may be some conflicts between certain contributions but providing you create the necessary backups before installing a contribution there really should not be any "compatibility errors". It "should" be standard procedure to create backups.
Yes initially its difficult to learn magento, but i have learned that its highly professional software
Heh, that's an interesting selection. I've developed sites on OSCommerce, Magento, and PrestaShop. OSC: There's modules for anything you can think of. Every (okay, maybe not) possible situation or payment gateway has a plugin for it. On the downside, it's a HUGE pain to maintain. If you want to upgrade to a later build, you've got to make sure you know which plugins you installed, and have to reinstall it every time. By "install" it isn't a simple click-to-install button. You have to find several lines of code throughout the app and replace junk. Terrible for maintenance. Mag: Some great features. Lots of functionality that you only see in high-end ecommerce stores. Terrible performance--you'll need a Magento-optimized host to get decent speeds. I had a dedicated vps running magento and it'd take 4-10 seconds to load pages sometimes. Even after a bunch of tweaks. Also, there's a steep learning curve. PrestaShop: love it. It's clean and simple. Easy to learn. It still lacks some features that other open source packages might have. But it seems that it's picking up steam and they're working hard to add lots of stuff to put it on par with other apps.