Appeal of open source ecommerce solutions

[chris_ochs]

I'm doing some research here and basically looking for feedback. I have spent the last 12 years designing and developing commercial ecommerce solutions, everything from payment gateways to shopping cart software to affiliate software. I'm in early stages of designing an open source ecommerce solution and I'm interested in how much appeal there is to the average webmaster for open source solutions.

My own opinion is that there is huge room for improvement in the open source products. Most of them try to be everything to everybody without the clear focus that a commercial product has, documentation is often lacking, and feature creap tends to be a major problem. Most of the open source products that really shine are still controlled by the company that created them. The code might be open source, but the design and development is still lead by a single company that has a decent business model. Mysql and Redhat for example.

So anyways, my own belief is that there is a good sized market for a polished open source ecommerce platform targetted at small to medium sized businesses, but that no one has put together a business model good enough to make it profitable.

Opinions?

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

One of my affiliates does OSCommerce shops for me and clients are often delighted with the results. My experience with commercial systems is limited but in my opinion OSC is more than a match for these.

Having said that I would always be willing to look at alternative OS systems. I feel that some of them fall down on ongoing support and change control. If someone provided an OS solution the equal or better than OSC I would be very interested. This would be particularly true if a premium, supported version was available at a reasonable price.

[ytswy]

I've tried to type a reply to this several times, but abandoned it each time because I've come to the conclusion that I know damn-all about the market for OSS cart software, despite using OSC for several sites over the last couple of years.

Initial reaction is that it sounds a great idea, but then I'm in the small business category that is already making use of OSS carts. I think you're talking about making a product that would go after larger clients (large to me starts at about 10 employees) and I know nothing about this market. So what I'm really thinking is that I could get access to better software - with the right to customise it and use other people's contributions - for little or no outlay; probably not your ideal target market.

If you've got any questions for someone who's been using OSC in the very small business area for a couple of years, I'd be more than happy to answer them.