Ask HN: best eCommerce Platform | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: best eCommerce Platform

6 pointsjfaucett5 comments

Hey Guys I could really use your expert opinion on choosing the right eCommerce platform for this project:

The client sells products in multiple countries, and ships from different countries, the tool needs to be able to be multistore and handle multiple languages (at first 3 but eventually up to 10) with ease. Right now I'm considering Magento, OpenCart, and Oxid.

What can you recommend me (or warn me against)?

Thanks in advance!

*added:

key issues are performance and scalability also we'll have to customize a lot (Ivisually and featurewise)so a nice codebase would be great (i.e. OOP, MVC, great modularity )

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Magento - Ease of use, template system with large selection of free and paid templates and the ability to get started with a few simple clicks.

As a novice to ecommerce and hacking, a girl friend sucessfully configured and sold an ecommerce solution withing 2 weeks. As a graphic designer non-techie, she (Hey Asiyah) used hostgator's auto-configuration via cpanel to install Magento, add a blog and create a customised cart. Additionally, she configured the template, added PayPal and Google checkout, customised layouts and added basic graphics using HTML.

For a complete novice, she managed to sell the setup, configure and sell the site withing 1 month. Now thats impressive for a designer with no experiance and no technical skills.

Really love Lemonstand (http://www.lemonstandapp.com). Super well developed and has been easy to customize. Great support. For simple, quick projects, I've used Shopify (hosted) and had a very good experience with it. Their team is very active and constantly adds new features and improvements. Our experience with Magento was a mess - we found it very difficult to work with, and far overkill for what we needed. I've heard good things about Spree (http://www.spreecommerce.com), but haven't used it myself yet.

thanks, I hadn't heard of any of those. I'll definately take a look at them, also thanks for the warning with Magento. Lemonstand looks good :)

FastSpring may be too full-service for what you're looking for, I'm not sure. 10 currencies are supported, 20 languages, there's multi-store management as you mentioned, etc. However, the products need to be digitally fulfilled (or be shipped via DVD/CD), and it sounds like you may be selling something physical.

Have you/they given any thought to a hosted solution like Shopify? They handle the complexity of the transaction and let you handle the reminder of the customization. It's an ideal solution for many ecommerce needs particularly if you want to get up and running quickly.

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