PrestaShop vs Magento vs Others



guerilla said:
If you are starting, I would avoid Magento. The learning and maintenance curve is steep.

I convinced 070707 (who was building a Magento site) to look at Shopify, and this is what he said;

I am not a Shopify fanboy, but I did run an X-Cart or two back in the day, and running your own cart, while doing everything else in the business is bullshit.

Let someone else handle cart maintenance, hosting etc, so you can focus on what you are good at.

If not Shopify, check out some other hosted solutions. Don't get caught fucking around with plugins, upgrades and template hacking. None of that makes you money.

**IF** your business takes off, then look at a custom solution (which Magento is) if you can justify the cost.
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Yeah, Shopify all the way. I'd use it to open an eCommerce store now, and switch over to something else if the need arose later / it became more cost effective. In the short term though it's highly cost effective, and saves a ton of the hassle of hosting your own software.
 
mituozo said:
Yeah, Shopify all the way. I'd use it to open an eCommerce store now, and switch over to something else if the need arose later / it became more cost effective. In the short term though it's highly cost effective, and saves a ton of the hassle of hosting your own software.
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I had a look at Shopify and I really like it. Sorry for my ignorance, but I don't understand what all the fuss about hosting is. I mean, I installed OpenCart on my HostGator account, and I'm not having any problems. Doesn't seem to be too much of a resource hog. Are you referring to the fact that the hosting most of us use won't be able to handle large amounts of traffic?
 
When you self host, you have to do manual upgrades. Plugin install is rarely point and click, and you are responsible for security which can be important if you are using a merchant account to process CCs.

There is the time, expertise etc of the above. That has an opportunity cost.

Shopify (I presume) is more money, but money can be earned. Time cannot.
 
guerilla said:
When you self host, you have to do manual upgrades. Plugin install is rarely point and click, and you are responsible for security which can be important if you are using a merchant account to process CCs.

There is the time, expertise etc of the above. That has an opportunity cost.

Shopify (I presume) is more money, but money can be earned. Time cannot.
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Well said, thanks man!
 
Another suggestion you can use is Volusion.

EDIT: just compared pricing and Volusion seems to be a bit cheaper than Shopify. Maybe someone can chime in to see if Volusion is any good??
 
marketer23 said:
Another suggestion you can use is Volusion.

EDIT: just compared pricing and Volusion seems to be a bit cheaper than Shopify. Maybe someone can chime in to see if Volusion is any good??
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I've read some not-so-hot reviews about Volusion, like downtime issues and shitty customer service. Not sure if they took care of them or not, but I've stopped considering them for now.

I'm pretty much down to Shopify and BigCommerce. I'm turned off by Shopifys 2% transaction fee.

BigCommerice's entry level package is about 6 dollars cheaper per month, but they make you use their SSL certs, which they charge 79 a year for, so the cost is about the same. overall.

Also, Shopify has some really nice free templates and a bunch of premium templates for purchase. In comparison, BigCommerce's templates don't look quote as polished, but you can always get a good designer.

I'm not a cheap bastard by any means, and I certainly value high levels of customer service and reliable operations, but if you're doing any kind of decent volume, that 2% transaction fee can add up to many thousands of dollars per year.
 
I just integrated my site with UltraCart and it is fuckin' amazing.

They have so many features it is ridiculous. 1-click Upsell after checkout is pretty sweet to grab that extra sale as well. They have an API if you want to create a completely custom checkout process that is certified badass.

It's basically a poor man's Limelight, which is fine with me. It has almost all the same features, just the dashboard and reporting aren't as nice visually.

You can sign up for a free trial account without a credit card.
 
I'll 3rd Shopify - I use it quite regularly. The product variants are a terrible way to implement options, but other than that it's a solid platform, and it's easy to get a theme designed and coded.
 
SkyFire said:
I'll 3rd Shopify - I use it quite regularly. The product variants are a terrible way to implement options, but other than that it's a solid platform, and it's easy to get a theme designed and coded.
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The best thing about Shopify is that it is probably the easiest and quickest to set up. The thing I hate is that they take 1-2%. In my niche I'm not selling dried seahorse penis extract with 1000% margins. I need to fight and claw to get my margins to where I want them to be. I can't afford giving away an extra 2% of each transaction to Shopify.
 
Paper_Chase said:
The best thing about Shopify is that it is probably the easiest and quickest to set up. The thing I hate is that they take 1-2%. In my niche I'm not selling dried seahorse penis extract with 1000% margins. I need to fight and claw to get my margins to where I want them to be. I can't afford giving away an extra 2% of each transaction to Shopify.
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Then drop the $179 for the top plan and don't pay a %. $179 is still nothing when it covers all the hosting, support, security, etc.
 
Fuck Shopify. BigCommerce is so much better. So is CoreCommerce once you take the time to learn it and don't mind the UI.
 
Lived with Magento and a merchant account for years. Then I decided to code my own basic ecommerce platform. It doesn't handle customer accounts or anything like that, I just shunt them over to Paypal checkout and let that handle everything. I think people feel safer paying through Paypal too.

At least with this I have full control over my site with simple PHP, and it's super lightweight.
 
Ultracart is good for recurring, but having a front end ecommerce store is painful with their software. Cs-cart is another great option and its cheap with just a one time fee, also much easier to setup and manage then magento for a smaller size store.
 
I started with "gasp" yahoo stores first. What a freakin nightmare. I then switched to BigCommerce. It is a bit pricier but there is no transaction feel and provides the most out of the box add ons you could ever need. I agree the templates leave something to be desired but they allow you to edit every bit of the template yourself. I have less than 1000 products right now so it works for me.
 
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