Ecommerce Software
- Thread starter Horshack
- Start date
petermeadit
Top Contributor
If you are building a lite site - medium with WordPress I feel WooCommerce is a pretty natural pathway. Very functional and easy to use.
findtim
Top Contributor
woocommerce
I'm enjoying it mostly, you need to look at security measures and at this moment wordfence is proving great. I got hacked over the weekend as you may know, but it was more denial of service, no credit cards get accessed as I am using offline CC processing, also if you are going to use paypal that will be good as well, using Eway is going to cost you and extra $100 a year.
there is far more experienced then me as members so hopefully they can add advice
the one point I would mention is that MANY of the plugins for woo are now yearly fees for updates so look at the cost involved in that.
bottomline, I am sticking with woo and have many in development at the moment so I am walking the talk.
if you want to expand on your dev I'm happy to review.
tim
I'm enjoying it mostly, you need to look at security measures and at this moment wordfence is proving great. I got hacked over the weekend as you may know, but it was more denial of service, no credit cards get accessed as I am using offline CC processing, also if you are going to use paypal that will be good as well, using Eway is going to cost you and extra $100 a year.
there is far more experienced then me as members so hopefully they can add advice
the one point I would mention is that MANY of the plugins for woo are now yearly fees for updates so look at the cost involved in that.
bottomline, I am sticking with woo and have many in development at the moment so I am walking the talk.
if you want to expand on your dev I'm happy to review.
tim
chris
Top Contributor
Hi Horshack,
It depends on what your overall plans are.
The big player in this space is Magento, with around 20% to 25% market share. It's powerful and can handle very complex requirements. If you plan on heavy customisation or integrating with other systems, this is one worth looking at.
For typical online shops, the WordPress options are a good choice. They are also maturing quite rapidly with healthy competition. WooCommerce is currently the leading shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It is free and does a lot out of the box, but if you want extra functionality you can purchase add-ons.
For WordPress:
WooCommerce
Cart66
MarketPress
If you're after a hosted option, here are a few:
Shopify
Bigcommerce
Volusion
For a big list of shopping carts with some basic pricing, check out this page at eWAY:
http://www.eway.com.au/helpful-advice/social-carts
Cheers,
Chris
It depends on what your overall plans are.
The big player in this space is Magento, with around 20% to 25% market share. It's powerful and can handle very complex requirements. If you plan on heavy customisation or integrating with other systems, this is one worth looking at.
For typical online shops, the WordPress options are a good choice. They are also maturing quite rapidly with healthy competition. WooCommerce is currently the leading shopping cart plugin for WordPress. It is free and does a lot out of the box, but if you want extra functionality you can purchase add-ons.
For WordPress:
WooCommerce
Cart66
MarketPress
If you're after a hosted option, here are a few:
Shopify
Bigcommerce
Volusion
For a big list of shopping carts with some basic pricing, check out this page at eWAY:
http://www.eway.com.au/helpful-advice/social-carts
Cheers,
Chris
findtim
Top Contributor
i haven't heard anything good about bigcommerce.
shopify and magento i know many people use, just check the ongoing fees.
i agree with chris that if you have a site thats going to get big hits and large range of products eg: 500+ then i would strongly look at magento first, it seems far more sturdy then all others.
if you are using a developer for magento then look at their past efforts and prepare to NOT pick the cheapest person.......... the experience will pay for itself in the end.
ecommerce conference is coming up in melbourne this month
http://www.ecomexpomelbourne.com.au/ , 25th-27th march
basically its free but you will just be hounded by people trying to sell you their services, but its a good chance to chat with experts, the "forums" cost you $400 a day but the general entry is free if you signup online
tim
shopify and magento i know many people use, just check the ongoing fees.
i agree with chris that if you have a site thats going to get big hits and large range of products eg: 500+ then i would strongly look at magento first, it seems far more sturdy then all others.
if you are using a developer for magento then look at their past efforts and prepare to NOT pick the cheapest person.......... the experience will pay for itself in the end.
ecommerce conference is coming up in melbourne this month
http://www.ecomexpomelbourne.com.au/ , 25th-27th march
basically its free but you will just be hounded by people trying to sell you their services, but its a good chance to chat with experts, the "forums" cost you $400 a day but the general entry is free if you signup online
tim
petermeadit
Top Contributor
Magento is pretty heavyweight IMO, it is a standalone platform and the whole thing is based around ecommerce. I feel it is more suited to a dedicated shopping site. Upwards of 1000 products. For large business.
When it comes to smaller sites with a wider variety of functionality, I would use WordPress with WooCommerce. This allows you the simplicity of WP with a blog for content, but also a powerful WooCommerce which handles lots of items with a lot of flexibility.
When it comes to smaller sites with a wider variety of functionality, I would use WordPress with WooCommerce. This allows you the simplicity of WP with a blog for content, but also a powerful WooCommerce which handles lots of items with a lot of flexibility.
James
Top Contributor
Hosted solution I use to do some online marketing work for the guys who run - http://www.ashop.com.au (good team for a entry level product) they are based right in Sydney as well.
This is an example of what the shop can look like - http://www.petbucket.com/
If not those guys go for a global player like Shopify for example they are decent for a hosted solution.
This is an example of what the shop can look like - http://www.petbucket.com/
If not those guys go for a global player like Shopify for example they are decent for a hosted solution.
findtim
Top Contributor
johno69
Top Contributor
yes, but the government don't have budgets, they have our taxes.
tim
Drupal & Ubercart are free (open source).
findtim
Top Contributor
i was more talking about the effort involved in maintaining it, from my understanding its very similar to joomla and to me joomla is a nightmare based on my use of it.
but i suppose if you learn something then it gets better. for me switching to woo was a big deal as i knew oscommerce but woo is very logical for me ...... and god knows i need that
tim
Ashman
Top Contributor
i was more talking about the effort involved in maintaining it, from my understanding its very similar to joomla and to me joomla is a nightmare based on my use of it.
but i suppose if you learn something then it gets better. for me switching to woo was a big deal as i knew oscommerce but woo is very logical for me ...... and god knows i need that
tim
It's not difficult to maintain if you know how to upload a file to your server and extract it. Can you do that Tim?
Ashman
Top Contributor
yes, but the government don't have budgets, they have our taxes.
tim
Yes the Government spent your taxes Tim to conduct a feasibility study on the best Content Management System.
findtim
Top Contributor
you forgot to mention they first had to form a committee to appoint a committee that decides to do the feasibility study so another committee can decide on the best CMS to use and once they decide and then employ hundreds of thousands staff to run it.
tim
Ashman
Top Contributor
you forgot to mention they first had to form a committee to appoint a committee that decides to do the feasibility study so another committee can decide on the best CMS to use and once they decide and then employ hundreds of thousands staff to run it.
tim
They also have a database of Wordpress developers in Australia and made sure they were the ones who paid for it.
An interesting new article on wordpress security today. Are people seeing many security problems with Magento?
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...rdpress-sites-abused-in-powerful-ddos-attack/
http://arstechnica.com/security/201...rdpress-sites-abused-in-powerful-ddos-attack/
nina
Top Contributor
Hi - I thought I'd chime in as I'm about to venture on a project of creating 1/2 dozen stores as demos using the exact same products to show users about how different they are.
I understand your concerns about WordPress I read that article last week and am amazed at how little people know about it's vulnerabilities.
We actually went through a series of stores - and I guess it does depend on your actual requirements.
We've been looking at Presta Shop, CS-Cart (not free but pretty good), smartstore - a .net mvc project which is from nopcommerce, and it's mobile off the shelf and easy to manage.
We read that magento is heavy, and has issues with caching, is not really scalable unless you buy the commercial version, and is expensive to customise, anything outside a purchased template - better dig deep.
Alot of wordpress add ons could be vulnerable, but the simple fact that wordpress is a consistent target, for me from a business perspective makes it a high risk solution, given that there are also other factors that make linux based hosting a sitting duck for being under attack. This is an observation, given that we do both windows and linux projects .
There is also shop factory - A partner of mine has been using shop factory and loves it. He says it's easy to use, and does all he needs.
Granted it's not a free solution either, but there are some modestly priced good solutions out there.
I think you'll find that no matter what you look at there are going to be some shortcomings - it's software but for me, security is the last thing I want to be consistently having to look out for when there are a heap of other solutions that are not going to be as vulnerable.
I use .net based software, but that's my choice. I have some clients on a store we installed 8 years ago and all we've done is upgrade as time goes by and it's proven to be very cost effective for them, however, I'm not going to recommend it here since the audience is primarily after php based solutions. I'm just saying there are better solutions than what wordpress can offer - it is not a CMS - it's a blog with insecure plug ins that look awesomely cool until they are defaced.
Drupal is a CMS and DNN (DotNetNuke)is also a CMS which is what I work with.
I understand your concerns about WordPress I read that article last week and am amazed at how little people know about it's vulnerabilities.
We actually went through a series of stores - and I guess it does depend on your actual requirements.
We've been looking at Presta Shop, CS-Cart (not free but pretty good), smartstore - a .net mvc project which is from nopcommerce, and it's mobile off the shelf and easy to manage.
We read that magento is heavy, and has issues with caching, is not really scalable unless you buy the commercial version, and is expensive to customise, anything outside a purchased template - better dig deep.
Alot of wordpress add ons could be vulnerable, but the simple fact that wordpress is a consistent target, for me from a business perspective makes it a high risk solution, given that there are also other factors that make linux based hosting a sitting duck for being under attack. This is an observation, given that we do both windows and linux projects .
There is also shop factory - A partner of mine has been using shop factory and loves it. He says it's easy to use, and does all he needs.
Granted it's not a free solution either, but there are some modestly priced good solutions out there.
I think you'll find that no matter what you look at there are going to be some shortcomings - it's software but for me, security is the last thing I want to be consistently having to look out for when there are a heap of other solutions that are not going to be as vulnerable.
I use .net based software, but that's my choice. I have some clients on a store we installed 8 years ago and all we've done is upgrade as time goes by and it's proven to be very cost effective for them, however, I'm not going to recommend it here since the audience is primarily after php based solutions. I'm just saying there are better solutions than what wordpress can offer - it is not a CMS - it's a blog with insecure plug ins that look awesomely cool until they are defaced.
Drupal is a CMS and DNN (DotNetNuke)is also a CMS which is what I work with.
