Ask HN: Most flexible open source e-commerce platform?

7 points·anujkk··2 comments

I'm exploring about open source e-commerce platforms for one of my e-commerce ventures. Please suggest me which one is best in terms of -

1. Flexibility in customization.

2. Simplicity in UI/UX.

3. Active community.

4. Plugin architecture and available plugins.

5. Technology - PHP or Python

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If your experienced with PHP, I'd highly recommend litecommerce which runs on Drupal. It's relatively flexible to customize; it's extremely simple in the front-end - in fact I fell in love with litecommerce mainly because of its UI. Well, the community is not as active as other platforms, but the the drupal community can definitely make up for it. I believe it does utilize a plugin architecture. It has some pre-made plugins that you can use. Although a lot of common features need to be achieved with plugins, but they are quite accessible. One thing to note is that it only runs on PHP 5.3 or above.

And if you are more experienced with Python, you can find a lot of flexible platforms that run on Django.

It's been a few months since I utilized Magento in a project, but I was very impressed (from a end-user perspective) with its UI/UX and feature set. It's based on the LAMP stack and has a very active community and a variety of plug-ins.

The downsides were that it is a little bloated, and the code isn't extremely well documented or developer friendly.

Of course that was a few releases back, and I'm sure a lot has changed since then, but I would definitely recommend you at least see if it meets your needs.

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