Ecommerce question

PhillipMarlow

PhillipMarlow

Pheasant Heavy Breathing
Mar 14, 2008
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Sorry for the noobish questions:

What I'm trying to do:

I'm trying to get an ecommerce site built and I need the CMS/control panel/product management interface to be very user friendly. I want to be able to upload product descriptions/pictures with relative ease.

I also want to be able to frequently add SEO friendly content (articles and such) to the site and have the navigation/product catagories/banner be added automatically every time a new page is created...The only experience I have is with something like this is wordpress and the all-in-one SEO pack and I've had great results with it...

Is there something this user-friendly for ecommerce? Or should I ask the guys who set my site up to create a sort of template page that can be modified and uploaded via ftp every time I create a new blogpost/page/article?

I searched through teh wickedfires and zencart SOUNDS like what I'm looking for. Zencart+dream templates maybe?

Thanks in advance for your feedback...
 


i'd recommend oscommerce, though it might take a little customization to get it to your liking..
 
Oscommerce, Magento, or Joomla/Virtuemart.

I'd personally go with the Joomla/Virtuemart or Magento solutions over Oscommerce.

There are also a couple of ecommerce solutions for wordpress, but I can't really comment on them as I haven't used them..... yet.

:R:
 
Thanks for the feedback...I'll check those out. I REALLY like wordpress...just not sure if it's robust enough for what I'm looking for. Also, I've read horror stories about people's sites getting haxored...
 
It kind of depends on the level of complexity, scalability and customization required. I hate OS Commerce and I'm not a big fan of Zen, Cube or any of the Joomla / WP solutions either. But, if it's relatively simple, it should be adequate.

Of the open source solutions, Magento is by far the best IMHO. But it's also the most complicated. It's the only thing I would use though if I was going to go that route. Most of the stuff I've worked with has been custom built.

Hit me up on PM if you need more info / advice.
 
it really depends on how many products you have because each shopping cart cms has different methods of inputing the products, some take longer then others but others are more customizable and larger. oscommerce is good because it has a ton of plugins and is very customizable(although difficult) and zend is good because its simple and more to the point.
 
Deliguy said:
it really depends on how many products you have because each shopping cart cms has different methods of inputing the products, some take longer then others but others are more customizable and larger. oscommerce is good because it has a ton of plugins and is very customizable(although difficult) and zend is good because its simple and more to the point.
Click to expand...

Inventory is ~150 products...oscommerce seo plugins look like what I'm looking for :drinkup:
 
Hackers hack anything profitable.

Look for a eCMS that makes it easy to flush CC and processing data in the database, and has the strongest encryption. That will be a deterrent to hackers, but ultimately, you'll need to use best practices like backing up offline and clearing out sensitive transaction data regularly.

If you are doing ANYTHING serious with ecomm, you need to at least be on a VPS, where someone elses shared hosting account doesnt get compromised and risk messing with your store.

One more thing you need to think about. Payment integration. Depending on your payment processor, that will determine which systems you can look at, as not all merchant account providers are supported by every cart. The more mainstream carts will obviously support more processors.
 
PhillipMarlow said:
Have you heard of open source ecommerce platforms having the same problem?
Click to expand...
no, but i imagine something like oscommerce is much more secure than a wordpress plugin. ubercart probably isn't much more secure either actually. i've mainly used ubercart for hacking together product feed sites w/o integration with a payment system.
 
I really like CS-Cart. The latest version is pretty user friendly. There's lots of built in features and the backend is nice to use. SEO is alright but could be improved. It's not free but they do have a fully functional 60 day trial.

I tried lots of carts before settling on CS. Magento is too complicated/bloated, Ubercart has a big learning curve if you don't know Drupal, and Zen/OS need a bunch of modules to be any good.
 
Another + for Magento - the dynamic attribute/attribute sets feature is nice and the data importer works well.

You'll need solid hosting for it though, if you stick it on a shared server it will most likely suffer performance issues.
 
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