Alright so you guys know what Zen Cart is, and for those who don't know what Magento, is.. its a open source e-commerce like zen cart but unlike zen cart its back supported by a large company and several well-known partners. They're updates and work on the project is very nice releasing updates very very often.
So i need some help picking between the two.
Magento
Website: http://www.magentocommerce.com
Magento has just come out of beta to become the best new open source shopping cart system. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards, making it clean and easy to work with. Out of the box it supports all of the features and goodies you would ever need from a shopping cart.
Advantages +
- Out of the box it has the most features such as Google Checkout, Order editing, Product import/export, and way to many more to list here
- Has the cleanest coding of all of the shopping carts reviewed
- Has an excellent templating system making it easy to upgrade
Disadvantages -
- It is the newest shopping cart so it has not been tested as much as the others for bugs. But they have designed it so that patches are easy to install.
- BIGGIE - Significant cost to host the platform and get decent performance. Magento is unusable in the shared hosting environment ($10/month type packages). It requires about $25+/month to host because you need a semi-dedicated VPS server. The only company we have found to have decent loading speeds while not costing $100/month is Crucial Web Hosting (A Magento partner). There hosting plan is $25/month.
Here is a website using Magento:
http://www.theclimbingshop.com/shop/
Zen Cart - The Art of E-commerce
website: http://www.zen-cart.com
Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. You can not install contributions directly from the Oscommerce web site onto Zen Cart. Some of the nice features include product attributes managers, template system, html editor for regular web page contents, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more. An issue with Zen Cart right now is the Easy Populate contribution which would let you import products from an Excel sheet does not work yet. So if you need this feature we recommend the other shopping carts.
Advantages +
- No licensing fees
- Stable
- Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed
- Nicer looking default designs pre-installed
Disadvantages -
- not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, they must be converted to Zen Cart
- Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed
Now you guys... can you offer me some views?
So i need some help picking between the two.
Magento
Website: http://www.magentocommerce.com
Magento has just come out of beta to become the best new open source shopping cart system. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards, making it clean and easy to work with. Out of the box it supports all of the features and goodies you would ever need from a shopping cart.
Advantages +
- Out of the box it has the most features such as Google Checkout, Order editing, Product import/export, and way to many more to list here
- Has the cleanest coding of all of the shopping carts reviewed
- Has an excellent templating system making it easy to upgrade
Disadvantages -
- It is the newest shopping cart so it has not been tested as much as the others for bugs. But they have designed it so that patches are easy to install.
- BIGGIE - Significant cost to host the platform and get decent performance. Magento is unusable in the shared hosting environment ($10/month type packages). It requires about $25+/month to host because you need a semi-dedicated VPS server. The only company we have found to have decent loading speeds while not costing $100/month is Crucial Web Hosting (A Magento partner). There hosting plan is $25/month.
Here is a website using Magento:
http://www.theclimbingshop.com/shop/
Zen Cart - The Art of E-commerce
website: http://www.zen-cart.com
Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. You can not install contributions directly from the Oscommerce web site onto Zen Cart. Some of the nice features include product attributes managers, template system, html editor for regular web page contents, built in coupon code system, ability to select what credit cards you accept, and more. An issue with Zen Cart right now is the Easy Populate contribution which would let you import products from an Excel sheet does not work yet. So if you need this feature we recommend the other shopping carts.
Advantages +
- No licensing fees
- Stable
- Many contributions from Oscommerce already installed
- Nicer looking default designs pre-installed
Disadvantages -
- not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, they must be converted to Zen Cart
- Admin interface is a little messy in certain areas because there are so many contributions installed
Now you guys... can you offer me some views?
