Comments on: Crash Course in Magento e-Commerce

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 20:39:53 +0000

I was fine with oscommerce until I ran into a lot of custom sites I had to build and most of the features I needed were built into Magento. Most oscommerce addons have to be cut and pasted into the default files, making any sort of rollback or core update a mess.
And yes, Magento doesn’t work well with shared hosting, but a dedicated host, for many companies, would be one of their smallest monthly expenses.

By: Lesya

Lesya — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:48:27 +0000

I agree – many small site owners would still rather stick to oscommerce. Though you can not deny the fact that thousands of people find magento the best solution for their stores.

If you also want to switch to magento you may take a look at cart2cart online service. It automates data migration fm your shopping cart to magento http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com

By: oSCommerce GURU

oSCommerce GURU — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:21:30 +0000

I have been developing in oscommerce software for 6 years. Stephen, magento is a nice platform, but it will not fit the majority of the small site owners out there. It IS resource intensive and you can’t run it on a shared environment on any platform. This hinders the potential to market to those site owners use to shared hosting. Oscommerce still has a larger community and magento will probably not even come close to that due to the fact that oscommerce is still the #1 ecommerce platform out there. just because you gain in searches does not justify that a certain platform will be more popular. Varien is doing alot of marketing, but the searches versus, downloads does not show enough analysis of how much of those downloads are nothing more then inspecting the software. There is not many sites out there with magento yet, it will take YEARS to get anywhere near oscommerce as far as popular enough to be used worldwide on all server platforms. The main problem with magento is that it uses too much server resources still and it has a long way to go before it will even be acceptable for shared hosting account owners, which IS the majority of small businesses. I know magento very well as we have been paying attention to it as well, but for the next 2 years at least, it is still too soon for that platform to take over any oscommerce based site until ALL of the issues are resolved with its performance and other api issues. for now, magento is a good platform to play around with until it morphs naturally to be one of the best carts to be made. Although we do tend to taylor to oscommerce variants and know the software very well, this opinion is just from what we observed. One of the most important things to watch for is if alot of users download something with high end download numbers, watch out, it might just be a 1 hit wonder. Just some thoughts. Time will tell. We will not be offering magento just yet, maybe in 2 years. Jim

By: Nez Art

Nez Art — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 15:39:44 +0000

I have been looking around for some training or study course for ecommerce related subjects. I came across this one at “ecommerce dot skillstrain dot co dot uk” (link on name). if there is these software packages available for this, then what would be the point of the course? any suggestions?

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 15:42:45 +0000

Mainly because osCommerce was the most popular open source shopping cart software available. It is only valid to compare Magento to it. And I have developed a few osCommerce sites as well. They are about as different in construction as could be, in no way similar. They are two different animals.

By: osCOmmerce Supportor

osCOmmerce Supportor — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:46:31 +0000

Why compare Magento to osCommerce at all?
Why not compare it to CRE Loaded or Zen Cart for that matter? Why osCommerce?

Because Magento is just osCommerce rewritten with its Add Ons built in. And because the son has to try and defeat the father in order to feel like a man.

osCommerce is 10 years old next year and jsut released V3.0. Magento is 2. I say “grow up”.

By: Kyle

Kyle — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 15:52:06 +0000

The difficulty in meeting the PCI standards is probably less of a concern than the cost to do so, which, from what I’ve been told, can be outrageous.

By: Stephan Miller

Stephan Miller — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:13:13 +0000

Magento is currently PCI compliant or could be easily configured to be: http://www.magentocommerce.com/company/pci-compliance . I have heard this “open source = security risk” many times and am not sure of the logic. Yes, if software is open source, security risks are visible to anyone who wants to find them to exploit them or, the important part, to fix them. But if it is closed source, only the company that develops the software can fix security issues. I have yet to meet a software company that has more developers than an open source community. After all, Windows is not open source and there have been a few security risks with that software.

By: webshopnews

webshopnews — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 09:55:25 +0000

Thanks for the interesting article. There is nothing more to say…

By: Yuka

Yuka — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:18:51 +0000

One product dies, another is born. It’s evolution.