Ask HN:What e-commerce package should I use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN:What e-commerce package should I use?

I am developing an e-commerce site to sell custom built computers, parts, software and consumer electronics. Kind of like New Egg, but with a limited selection of best in class products. I would like to integrate strong community / social marketing into the site.

I have looked at osCommerce, Zen Cart, Magento, and others. I'll most likely end up going with an open source solution and customizing it.

Do you have any recommendations or experience?

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I love and use osCommerce. There is great support for it in the community. IMHO, oscommerce is only good for the e-commerce aspect and wouldn't really serve well for the "community/social marketing" aspect of the site.

I would recommend getting Joomla with the VirtueMart (http://virtuemart.net/) module. VirtueMart provides a very good shopping cart solution and you can use the Joomla CMS for all other aspects of your site.

I'll have to look into virtumart- I have heard about it, and I have worked with Joomla in the past. Might be a good fit.

Thanks!

Magento is a more modern application, and looks significantly cleaner internally than Zen or osCommerce. They also have significant forward momentum--it seems to offer the right solution set to a large class of users, and so it's rise in popularity has been dramatic (I get yelled at daily because our product can only install it on a few very modern distros, because of the PHP 5.2 requirement).

I don't get a headache (much) looking at the Magento source, but it is a huge project with hundreds of files, and I can imagine it would take a long time to grasp it when it comes to customization. But, the other two you mention are also subject to this problem, and their code is a bit more old-fashioned (and given that the PHP community has only recently begun to pay attention to maintainability and readable/testable code, that's an important consideration). Though none of them seem to have any unit tests, so I guess it's still not quite caught on.

I would look into Amazon Webstore as well, just to see if it meets your needs. It is less customizable in terms of changing the code, but it definitely encourages purchases, which Amazon has down pretty good, and you can also probably get a few products that you might not want to stock, and sell them on commission. You can always build the social part over the store, with people only going there to purchase something.

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