I think it's smarter to use an already set up platform. A good one is Shopify. You cant go wrong with them. They have all the tools you need in one.
I tried Magento and spent thousands in support. I just got a custom platform built thats made for channel marketing and conversion tracking with IEG Group . They are some of the team from Digital River who helped develop Toshiba and Sears' ecommerce platforms. I am about 10 days from launch. I am hoping it will be great but would love to keep you all updated if you'd like.
It depend of your scale of ecommerce. if your are strat up. i suggest wordpress with woocomerce, or opencart, but for big scale, i suggest you magento. chaiyooo.
Magento is the best because of it's structure, scaleability, security and available extensions. Only enterprise standard open source e-commerce platform.
well magento is definitely one of best solution but sometime it gets very slow and not advised for non-technical person(my opinion). Admin dashboard is very hard to manage. However, bigcommerce is very good option.
osCOMMERCE is dead, has been for a few years, I have been working online since 2001 , and honestly, if your not going to sell more then like 300 products, You should use Marketpress which is a wordpress plugin. Wordpress will give you a huge and powerful backend, Marketpress is ...well just really well written, http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/e-commerce/ ( its a paid plugin ) I have used over ( 10 ) scripts / platforms, over the last 4 years, I dislike very much: Zencart Oscommerce Mangato Shopify ( WAY to out for themselves ) I LIKE Marketpress because: It converts ! Its clean Its written by an ARMY of wordpress developers that always update Its built with YOU the store owner in mind It works on the WORLDS most powerful and most used script. If you need to "expand" your website or look, your using wordpress Its easy to find a coder. I hope this help you with your choice, Please let me know if you need anything else.
Definitely I would suggest you to use Magento and Opencart as these are among the best platforms used for ecommerce website development purposes.