Zen cart vs. Magento?
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- boobs
I need to set up an online store for about 600 items.
Which would be easier/faster to get up and running? Which would be simpler to train my clients to perform updates, and keep running?
- effour0
magento is quite a learning curve. i've been using x-cart for a few years and will me migrating over to magento in the next few months. but it's so much more robust than any other opensource cart.
- d_rek0
A couple that i've been eyeing for an upcoming project:
Relatively new Lemonstand: www.lemonstandapp.com
and Interspire Shopping Cart: http://www.interspire.com/shoppi…
Would love to get feedback on Interspire - has pretty much all of the features my client is looking for. Thoughts?
Would love to hear feedback if anyone has used either...
- Akiraprise0
Magento is a very powerful ecommerce cart than can do pretty much everything that your client will ever want, but agreed it is a massive learning curve and can be very tempermental.
- boobs0
Well, it seems like there's a new one of these every day. But I want to know about Magento vs. Zen Cart.
- acescence0
magento is a serious resource hog, don't even think about it unless you've got some beefy hardware = no shared hosting!
- effour0
Stay open source is the only advice I have for you. If you lock yourself into interspire, then you have to deal with them for any type of changes bug fixes, etc. They probably have paid support system and will fuck you for anytime of support you will need.
x-cart is a good cart, it's been around for years, and has a huge community with a ton of 3rd party mods.
don't get involved with a cart that is new and make sure you know what features like shipping and taxes you require and if the cart will support it.
I've been running e-com stores for 6 years and done alot of research into carts, made alot of mistakes along the way and if you want my advice, magento or x-cart...
- d_rek0
sorry boobs
*start thread hijack...
effour,
Yeah. I'm trying to get my feet wet for a freelance project I have. I wont be shy and say i'm not sure what to look for when going through each platform... and we definitely don't want to be tied to a paid support system.
my client has some pretty specific requirements though:
-must be able to integrate with Quickbooks POS
-will want gift registry services for the site
-Will probably have a smaller inventory initially (50-60 items) but will eventually probably include their entire inventory (hundreds of items).Shipping and tax code will be strictly limited to US and locally in Vermont (where his business is run from), so I think we're OK there.
As far as x-cart goes - I am by no means a seasoned developer but I will have a pretty talented developer working with me on this one. On the design side I am concerned about customizability of the site.
-How painstaking is it to customize a site using x-cart?
On the administrative side I am concerned about the dashboard: My initial reaction is that it is not as pretty/robust as others i've come across.
How do you find your clients reacting to the x-cart dashboard?
Sorry for the laundry list of Q's but i'm trying to be as well informed as possible before I jump into this lake ;)
- Those are all good questions. The more elaborate we can take this discussion, the better.boobs
- effour0
x-cart will accommodate all your needs.
X-cart is smarty template based, so it's quite easy. I'm no super programmer and i was able to tweak it to my needs and there is alot of support in their community forum and alot of paid modules.
Couple sites I have developed running it:
www.lifetimecollective.com
www.saxxapparel.comCheck -must be able to integrate with Quickbooks POS
Check -will want gift registry services for the site
Check -Will probably have a smaller inventory initially (50-60 items) but will eventually probably include their entire inventory (hundreds of items).Let me know if you have any other questions...happy to help
- x-cart looks pretty robust, but still, would rather hand-code templates rather than have them generated for me...pastpastdue
- There are so many elements to a page and products, you cannot simply handcode a template, i think the've approached it a way that allows the most fliexibility for your design. and when your are done with your templates. You can generate a HTML file for every page allowihng ultimate speedeffour
- section_0140
d_rek, if you're working with a "pretty talented developer", shouldn't shopping cart system be more or less his area?
I've checked out the source code on both of those and a hole hell of a lot more e-commerce packages. From what I could gather, adding features that aren't included, customizing their templates and shit like that is a real pain in the ass. Regardless of what you go with, you or the developer are going to have to sift through tons of files and figure out their system. There's no way around that.
I've been developing my own e-commerce system based on Kohana because I can't be bothered to strip down another all in one e-commerce package just to find out I hate it. That's not really an option without a good bit php experience though.
That doesn't really answer your question to which is better, but from experience I can tell you that customizing and adding features to all in one e-commerce is almost always a pain. Which reinforces my initial statement....Why isn't the developer handling this?
- d_rek0
@effour
How do you feel about designing or organizing content w/ tables? It seems like a lot of these platforms use some pretty archaic markup - I think lemonstand is really the only thing i've come across that seems to have picked up on recent technology.
I could be wrong... but still just throwing Q's out there.
@section_104,
Yes, it *will* be his area. He's talented and has plenty of exprience working with CMS's but not so much various eCommerce platforms. It will be a learning process for both of us - but that's why we're trying to get as best informed up-front as possible.
- effour0
new versions of x-cart are all div based, as is magento.
The version of x-cart i'm using is from 2007 on the stores above, and when i started development things were just starting to move in that direction and not completely adopted at the time.
and i hate working with div based designs, mainly because i don't do alot of coding anymore, haven't picked it up and can't be bothered to learn it right now...fucking block and inlines and clear and all that shit, i end up just screwing it and using a table...
- haha... see.. i learned with CSS.. so that's where i'm strong. My dev will work with tables but despises them. Apples to oranges thing i guess.d_rek
- apples to oranges I guessd_rek
- i learned web development in 2000...it's changed, ALOT! I do more operational stuff now and have hired a script kiddie for everything noweffour
- pastpastdue0
Bump.
effour, would you hate me if I asked in more detail, how the templating/smarty stuff works? I can't play around with it on the demo.
Also, do you integrate with eCC? If so, how does it work?
- vaxorcist0
I get the impression that Magento has more gee-whiz visual effects, but requires more learning curve and a "think-like-they-do" attitude to customize it... whereas anything smarty-related requires less brain-RAM unless you've never worked with smarty...