How friendly is the setup + admin? I have experience with carts like volusion and 1shoppingcart, but am thinking of migrating to a self-hosted solution. I've heard Magento is a good solution...any reviews/recommendations? Thanks
There's so many good solution on e-commerce, such as oscommerce, zen chart, prestashop, and magento. i use prestashop in daily shop.
Magento is one the best shopping cart available today. I had a very good experience with the software when I first use it. It is very user friendly and even if you are first time user you can easily get around with the software very quickly.
Unless you have a powerful server to host magento, I dont recommend it. Magento uses a lot of resources since it's very powerful ecommerce, and the design is very flexible. Search for "slow magento" and you'll see what I mean.
i use magento for one of my sites, its not as easy to customise as prestashop but easyer than oscommerce so compared to other e-commerce platforms i have used its the 2nd best, they have good support forums i think too
If you need a feature/payment gateway thats not in the default feature set deveopemnt costs are far higher than say oscommerce based stores due the relative newness of the platform. To throw a cruve ball out there we use a platform called apache ofbiz. Its epic but only if you have a good developer as the learning curve is massive ( and development more expensive than osc )