My job as a Web Marketer has become somewhat pushed aside as I have taken on many roles ranging from Project Manager to Web Administrator. Finally, my boss decided to give me the official title of Web Manager. Since it was now my job to manage the website and the employees who work with the website, I felt (as did my co-workers) it was time for an upgraded e-commerce platform. We chose to go with Magento Enterprise Edition, but being that I was the only programming in the company, and the company has over 100,000 products we needed a full development team. So I started to do some research. I had a few general questions I asked each of the partnered companies that worked with Magento Commerce such as:
- How long have you been working with Magento E-commerce?
- How many websites have you built using Magento E-commerce? Can we see them?
- What kind of timeframe would we be looking at for this project? (Turns out I needed to answer that question)
- Aside from development and deployment, is there any support for post-launch ie: 30-day post-launch support?
Only 2 companies had good answers that I really liked and in the end the company we chose was Lyons Consulting Group. I’m not sure if it was just because of the fact that they were on the same timezone as us, which – in my opinion – makes communication easier since you have more hours in the day to discuss plans for the website, or that the consultant I was speaking with answered all of my hundreds of questions through the several week decision making process. When we finally made the decision to go with them, it was a feeling of bliss in my opinion. But for me, that was only because now I knew I could actually focus my attention on the marketing of the website and continue to manage it without worrying if it needs to be programmed or reprogrammed. That’s all for now, until next time…
PS: My personally posted articles will become more informative in the future when I have more time research an article’s topic before writing, so stay tuned.
Popularity: unranked [?]
I’d like to start off this site with discussing something that can be used by either a developer, a designer, or pretty much anyone who is one the internet that is working with business – e-commerce. Not just any e-commerce, but Open Source e-commerce solutions. I’ll discuss several different solutions and then give my opinion on which one I prefer and why. Feel free to comment, I’d like to have a community base here, so I hope to here from visitors again and again. Anyway, without further ado…
- Magento
Magento was started by a web development firm in Los Angeles by the name Varien. The thing that impresses me the most about this shopping cart is that for an Open Source e-commerce solution, it really does have a lot of bells and whistles. Wishlists, shop by price and category, item comparison – all the things that you may expect a professional web store to have. You can view a full list of all the features, in PDF form, here. In short, here are just a few that surprised me:
- Multiple Images with Zoom
- Batch Import and Export of Catalog (Love that for big stores)
- One page checkout!
- Product comparisons
- Cross Sell/Up Sell
- Filters
- OScommerce
OScommerce has a slew of companies (over 14,110 websites to date) that use this Open Source e-commerce solution. But what makes them different then the rest? In my personal opinion, the community. OScommerce has a great forum with thousands of users who are always helping each other out with any and all issues they run into when trying to customize their website. The range of users starts from beginners to expert coders. So what features do you get with OsCommerce? There are multiple payment Gateway’s to choose from including (but not limited to) – 2Checkout.com, Authorize.Net, ChronoPay, iPayment, PayNova, Paypal, PSIGate, SecPay and TrustCommerce. Other features include:
- Support for physical (shippable) and virtual (downloadable) products
- Object oriented PHP backend
- Free Community Add-ons
- Send HTML E-Mails from the Backend
- Purchase Without an Account
- Backup/Import/Export Features
- Zencart
Zencart’s website doesn’t do justice to the professionalism of the end product, and although it doesn’t not offer as many payment processing options as OScommerce and other e-commerce platforms it is a more mature product, with OScommerce often taking quite a long time to release fixes for important issues such as security. ZenCart is a fork of OScommerce so you can expect very similar sorts of features, its also easier for the newbie developer to get into than OScommerce. Payment gateways include LinkPoint, Authorize.Net and Paypal.
- User frontend is validated to XHTML 1.0 Transitional
- Any PHP coding changes can be protected during upgrades by using the built-in override protection system
- Integrate with phpBB
- Meta Tags keywords and descriptions can be controlled at the per-product level
And so, these appear to be the three most popular Open Source and Free e-Commerce Solutions on the web. In my personal opinion, of the three, I prefer OScommerce over the others. With it’s large community that is still growing, the amount of add-ons that are available for beginners and experts to use, and the level of ease to set it up, it’s a sure fire win in this Open Source e-Commerce competition.
Popularity: unranked [?]
