Magento

Great name huh? And thats only where it begins.

Magento from the get-go has been ultra-professional in every way, shape and form. Click that link above to get a glimpse of what I am talking about with their website and the way everything is presented. The design is outstanding and it is echoed throughout the software package.

They are doing things a little bit differently than the other open source projects out there, in that there is a well defined company working on the project not just a community of developers with spare time. Much more similar to an ubuntu set-up where this project is their output but they offer other things along with it to help support their business and improve the product itself.

At first I was a little wary of this way of doing things because I don’t want to get invested in a product that I thought was free but then have to plunk down 50 bucks for every extension I want to add but now I have no more worries about that. Yes, there are corporate scripts you can purchase for added functionality, but there are also community (free) scripts out there as well, in fact there are more of those than the other way around. I have not even needed the extra scripts at all, everything is working out of the box for me right now.

I am somewhat new to this piece of software so my review is not as intensive because I have not seen every nook and crannie yet, but the thing is, I can’t wait to. From the installation itself (which downloads many of the necessary files for you) to the first time I log in to the administration section it is a well choreographed display of design mixed with all the necessary store elements.

Check out their full screenshots

I know, I know, it sounds like I am being paid out the ass for this post but no, I am just in the honeymoon phase with a great piece of software… like that first time you used e-bay and couldn’t stop selling everything you owned because it was just so easy!

The real reason I am loving it is because what I thought was gonna be a tough project with different stores, different product/buyer arrangements etc… turns out to be a couple of forms in the admin section and I’m off to the races.

So far I am enamored with it as you can probably tell and I fully support you test it out for your next e-commerce venture. I will be starting a couple skins / site integrations in the coming weeks for my company’s new escapade so comment below if your testing it and have any problems I will see if I can troubleshoot since I will be knee-deep in it by then.

On to work!

Building a shopping cart from scratch is something I could do if I really wanted to, but why re-invent the wheel they say? To create a system which you could just drop in to a new site and be up and running is an undertaking of pretty immense proportions. For that reason, two years ago I chose the open-source solution of osCommerce.

As you may know open-source is your friend, and after dealing with drupal, joomla (mambo), wordpress etc… the same kind of set up is evident in these shopping carts we will talk about today. There are obvious differences in naming schemes and organization but on a whole the idea behind each one is similar so its easy to pick apart an osCommerce if you have a history with other open source projects.

To provide you background my job required me to build or get up and running a shopping cart for a host of different products that also entailed a pretty hectic / varied order fulfillment and purchasing scheme. I searched for a while for the right product, looked at zen cart, a drop-in addition to Drupal, and a few others but settled on osCommerce.

osCommerce : A Post-Use Review
Out of the box osCommerce installed with ease if you have done that sort of thing before, and there were few problems with initial set-up and skinning. However, integration with shipping and payment services took a little bit more effort than I would have liked, the modules took a good deal of reading about to get going. Some of this is par for the course for getting acquainted with a particular piece of software but I did struggle with parts of the system as I bent them to suit my needs.

Design-wise osCommerce is very Web 1.0 and lacks that special pizzaz I wanted. After a complete re-skinning, and butchering of the site’s code to make it work for my particular project, a decent result was established but with the downside being upgrading past that point to a new generation of code would be next to impossible.

Let me touch on the design for one more second… unlike most systems you actually have to install a templating extension if you want to do anything really revolutionary with the code, it wasn’t built in with the ability to change very easily. Still even after that, one osCommerce site looks like another without taking every piece apart and reassembling it on your own. That almost defeats the purpose of using an out of the box system if it takes that much set-up and configuring to complete the job.

Finally the administration side is built with one thing on its mind. Displaying your data in the most boring ways possible and making it impossible for the non-web designers to navigate. Trying to explain the system to my boss or anyone who wanted to maintain it normally resulted in stares, and not because these people aren’t savvy enough to pick up a storefront administration but because it was cumbersome and awkward and didn’t work like you would think it should. If your gonna be passing on osCommerce to the unfamiliar be forewarned, write documentation.

When the site was up… it worked. It maintained customer and purchase data, made orders work, organized my products, displayed them properly and made some money for the company. Still, it was just a store and nothing special, I was not over whelmed or disappointed just content to let it sit there.

Bear in mind that this was 6-9 months ago and software changes, but my interaction with open source e-commerce started off pretty boring.

Stay tuned for Part 2 where I recommend my new favorite toy…..