Many people said Magento, but I would suggest to check Abantecart. I have used it for my clients for about year now. Much easier and faster than magento. Do not have to believe me, try yourself or check abantecart users comments on review sites.
Nobody's mentioned 3dCart! Full disclosure, they're a partner of ours -- but we're also partnered with several of their competitors, whom I won't mention here because they've all pretty much been checked off the list. A lot of our customers use 3dCart and love it. It's super easy to set up, and I've personally seen some really nice-looking storefronts set up by folks with limited (at best) coding, programming, or design experience. It's paid and hosted, but the prices are competitive, the security is tight, and their API is very robust, allowing for a ton of integrations. Hope that helps! No affiliate link or anything like that - just a genuine recommendation.
Do you have a short list of the essential addons to get woo commerce functioning? I have had a look at it but have hesitated due to the plethora of addons listed
I think this is really going to depend upon your store and what you've got in mind for it. Every store is different, so the list of bare essentials will probably read a bit differently from store to store. Various aspects of your online selling operation (eg, your vendor setup, how you get your inventory, where you keep it, what kind of features you offer customers) will impact the list of essentials that you need in order to get Woo Commerce functioning the way you want it to. Because really, when you're trying to start and/or run a business online? Functioning isn't good enough. Things need to function exactly the way you intend them to, so you can keep those margins looking nice!
Thanks for your reply. I already have some commerce sites powered by x-cart and on a hosted platform but have a couple of small niche ideas which would involve 10 products or so on each. Thus they don't really justify a lot of expense in the early stages on what would in effect be a beta test. If I could set up woo commerce or similar without too much expense it would be useful. Thus if you could recommend what would be needed to allow PayPal payments and local country shipping it would be very helpful.
I recently dived into this world and started an ecommerce site with Wordpress. I find many of the things about it tedious and not as cheap as they advertise. I highly recommend using your experience to make the decision. If you are an experienced website creator and know programming then by all means go open source. If you are lacking in experience you probably should consider hiring someone to build it for you. Depending on your goals for your business. If you are more focused on learning then build it yourself. Eventually you just have to decide and work with the choice you made.
I assume it was Magento that was conquering an ecommerce market and the demand of Magento is still rising. So, I would vote for Magento only.
Magento is the best eCommerce platform in 2013. You can also watch that which one eCommerce platform is dominating in 2014. http://www.drewsanocki.com/announcing-the-best-ecommerce-platform-of-2014/
Following are the best e-commerce platforms: Magento. Shopify. BigCommerce. Volusion. But I personally think Magento is the best.
According to me if you are new user then you I would suggest Shopify for non-experienced users you can see the detailed comparision here http://ecommerce-platforms.com/comparison-chart so that you can select better ecommerce platform for your need
Joomla and Magneto require a bit of programming knowledge in my experience so depends how comfortable you are with that side of things. If you're a complete novice, perhaps start with a demo of Shopify or Bigcommerce. Good luck.