Excellent new free open source e-commerce software Magento

If you're looking for e-com software, take a look at the Magento release:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

It's open source, and works great.

I've just started looking into magento and I'm not sure whether to take the jump or not. Its looks really deep and has an incredible amount of features, but I'm concerned the learning curve may be too long and steep.

I've also read that its gobbles up alot of resources; one reason was because its built using the Zend platform.

I like all the bells and whistles, but is it stable/mature enough for someone to get a site(s) up and running properly in a reasonable time frame. Has anyone had experience with magento?

The next level down would be programs such as Volusion, Shopsite, etc. Volusion seems to have a great feature set except from what I've read a few major flaws. For one, you can't edit/customize the pages, nor can you name the pages whatever you want. Users of Volusion say the SEO works well, but the page urls looked awfully long and spammy.

Shopsite is not as feature-rich as Volusion, but does provide you with more flexibility for customization.

If anyone has a recommendation for other ecommmerce software packages to evaluate, please pass them along.

Thanks

I prefer magento because it's so robust and full of features, but for a simple solution you may want to look at Zen cart:
http://www.zen-cart.com/

[QUOTE=itcn]I prefer magento because it's so robust and full of features, but for a simple solution you may want to look at Zen cart:

Thanks. You prefer Zen Cart of X-cart and CubeCart?
I'd prefer to have a more robust solution.
Have you had any performance issues with a magento solution? Will magento work well on a shared hosting solution or does it need to run on a dedicated or vps server?

Hi,

I was in the same position as you a couple days ago - searching for a fairly decent, easily configurable (& free) ecommerce solution - to try and assist a friend in creating a relatively simple online shop.

After looking/playing around with a number of solutions I settled on magento too - as it seemed to have great functionality & the online help seemed fairly decent (it has a wiki, forum, etc).

The problem I had was successfully installing it. Magento has some fairly specific web server requirements - which not all hosting providers will meet by default, you may want to look into this before deciding. I have a few domains on fasthosts, and they were unable to support it on windows or linux.

Eventually I found a post on the magento forum from someone at 'simplehelix(.com)', a US hosting provider that will allow you to pay just $5 for a 'magento developer testing licence' - which will allow you to install it on your domain (in fact, they already have the installation files hosted, you can simply run them in your hosting control panel), play with it, break it, learn how to use it - before you either upgrade to a full hosting account, or confirm it's the software you want to use and install it on your own web server (assuming it's supported) - OR decide it's not for you.

If you search the magento site for a 'magento-check.php' file, you can upload this to your webspace, run it, and it will tell you which of the magento software requirements are met & not met. Message me if you have any trouble finding it.

Having played with it for just a few hours, it certainly looks like I'll be using it for my friends shop - it has absolutely everything I need - however, I think it'll take another few hours at least to get a full grip on the back-end store configuration and custom settings (and I'm a pretty competant pc/web user).

Most of the files you'd want to customise, such as the images & css, are readily available to amend/change - and I think slowly some reasonable free themes are starting to pop up (google it) - so you might find the kind of store-front you want straight out of the box.

Dan

Thanks Dan,

I did download the php file which was helpful in identifying the inadequacies of my current server configuration. I found some hosts that will load magento for me in a shared hosting environment, but I don't want to have performance issues like my current host. I have several aging servers that my sites reside, and are often too slow that I lose a lot of conversion due to simple performance issues.

Although the "free" software is enticing, its not by any means mandatory. The key for me is to find a robust package that can have things such as complete SEO page mod control, url naming etc., product upsell recommendations, product reviews, customizable search function. - Magento certainly seems to have all these functions, but a) can I get them all to work ; b) will I have to chase revisions of Magento, PHP, etc. because the software is so new and continually evolving?

Let me know how your next couple of hours of analysis works out.

Magento is great as an open-source ecommerce solution (probably one of the best), but it's slow (it's object oriented, built on Zend), hard to extend. Zen-Cart, CubeCart, osCommerce and the like are all okay solutions, but really X-Cart is probably the best route, as it's well rounded, easy to extend, open-source (but not free), with a very active user community and developer community. Also, it's one of the faster carts out there, and it can always be optimized for more speed by disabling features that you don't need.