magneto and oscommerce work good for me. Magneto is really a powerful tool for making ecommerce websites.
People will tell you how many products you sell matters, what products you sell, and the kind of customer services you offer will decide the best shopping cart for you. Being a Wholesale or a Retail online store actually also decides. If you're a retail company, you can afford a quick free osCommerce online front. If you're a wholesale company, you have customers ordering tonnes of items, also in gicantic qualities. In a situation like that, you can't afford the flawed ordering system and extensive checkouts offered by carts like MagentoCommerce, Zencart, and OSCommerce. A system like SpeedOrder Cart or another shopping cart system with a modified ordering system would be best. All carts set aside, wether retail or wholesale, MagentoCommerce makes you want to quit the site before you have to wait for the next page to load. . . in five minutes.
I agree that Magento is loaded with features, but does anyone know how to get it to run faster? I run it on a Linode VPS and I can't believe it runs as slow as it does. I thought at first it was just my setup. It sounds like I'm not alone with this problem.
I have heard a lot about Magneto as its free and has all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features that helps top get traffic on your website.
Magento is a good software, but you'll have to pay for good hosting - because it will run very slow unless it is specifically configured to run magento. There are a number of hosts that offer magento specific hosting.
when just a few products are for sale i use e-junkie, for 5$ a month they have a nice package, i create buy it now buttons and just paste the button code into my already designed product pages. allows me to integrate numerous payment options into one cart. if you dont care about more than just offerring paypal use the paypal cart. i have never seen a large drop in conversions because i used the free paypal checkout option, if the person is willing to pay with paypal they are willing to follow through to the paypal site.
I think VirtueMart is good solution, probably because in this way you will receive also good support and very active comunity there.