Shopping Cart for store with 500,000 products

Hmm

[lpiracing]

We're thinking of switching shopping cart providers. We need a cart with the following:

1. Must be built to handle 500,000 products.
2. Must have robust import and export of categories and products
3. Must provide the source code
4. Make / Model / Year from the cart supplier or 3rd party is a must


A lot of musts I know. We've learned a lot with our current cart, and it's a fine cart for 5,000 products, but we are outgrowing it.

Thoughts?

[lorax]

What's your current cart? (no urls please).

[lpiracing]

Product Cart

[plasma800]

I'm hunting for the same thing. I'll add a couple of musts.

Must have built in "attribute navigation"
Must be super seo friendly.

I have been trying to get Magento going now for about 4 weeks but it's about as stable as a 1 year old baby.

Any other thoughts?

[gpilling]

I tried Magento for automotive - couldn't get it to work right. I purchased Interspire and then regretted it. You can make the Make/Model/Year thing work, but the AJAX on the backend is useless when you have a few thousand products. Also the export fields don't match the import fields, which totally baffles me. I know what to use to make ZenCart work for this, but it is getting old and has security issues. I also looked at Wrenchhead software but decided that was too pricey.

I too would like some good suggestions for this particular ecommerce problem.

[plasma800]

I'm tellin ya right? I looked at interspire but it has no attribute navigation per se.

I have used Volusion extensively but it also has no attribute nav and after a year of working with it I've only produced possibly 100 sales total.

Ektron is totally for a two person development team. I just don't know where to turn next. I guess custom is the only way these day?

[plasma800]

and I can't quite recall what it was i didn't like about aspstorefront.net but there was something.

[chadhenry]

I highly recommend Magento for something like this.

@lpiracing - do you have a limited budget? If not, I would definitely recommend Magento Enterprise Edition. If you do, their community addition is just as good, however, I would stay one or two releases behind the current release.

@plasma800 - I've had some issues getting Magento up and running as well but usually after a bit or troubleshooting I can get it stable and working without a problem. PM me if you need some help and I'll see what I can do.

[ItsAllBallBearings]

Stay very far away from Volusion. They are crap ever since moving from Rackspace.

If you're budget is sky high, check out MaxEXP

[pageoneresults]

After seeing these topics come up over the years I'm convinced that most folks in this category are better off building their own. I mean, if you need to house 500,000 products and have it scale, maybe you should make the investment and DIY?

Seriously. We've done our own and I'm glad that we did. It only has what the client needs and sure, it may be lacking in some of the really feature rich stuff but you know what? We've done just fine without it.

Most of the carts I've reviewed and demoed over the years fail at the basics. I'm working with one right now where the developers decided that it was best to generate table based deprecated markup for all the skins, just great! I've been through 50 of the 100+ templates so far and have removed tens of thousands bytes of deprecated code. Based on what I've seen, these Developers are using WYSIWYG and since I'm on Windows, I get all the Controls crap from ASP.NET, what a nightmare that produces.

I'm fortunate that I have a highly qualified dev on board. If I didn't, I'd be battling the same things you folks are. My suggestion is that you put out a call for a top notch dev. Give them a respectable budget to work with and build your own. Surely with 500k products, you can justify the development costs? ;)

[tangor]

I agree with p1r! I've worked in other IT (not ecommerce for websites) where there were no turnkey solutions. Built it ourselves for less than paying to have extensions built for apps that just weren't there (though very good). Sometimes a single, dedicated app is better than something more featured, but not as robust. The end game is results.

[plasma800]

yeah so far i'm sticking to magento. It's a rough rough ride though!

[plasma800]

and volusion blows ass. I hate it. I have a site there with about 2000 products on it and in a total of two years, I've only been able to produce about 120 sales.

[Philosopher]

I've been sticking with magento as well. It definitely has it's issues, but it's the closest to what I want that I've found.

It's sluggishness can be fixed by finding a lightspeed based host.

The main downside I've found with it is it's dependence on javascript without gracefully degrading.

[plasma800]

yeah the code in the java script is very very very large. But I'm going to give it a whirl anyway.

[FSOStorefront]

we've used aspdotnetstorefront for over 2 years and have been very happy w/ it. We have roughly 3,ooo products and have seen month to month growth for over a year.

edit: I just checked their site and they now say "Designed for Stores up to 250,000 Products" so I guess it would not work for you.

[gpilling]

What the original poster needs is something that complies with the AAIA PIES standard. There are only a few carts, some are quite ugly and all are expensive.

Does anyone want to split the cost of developing one?

[AffiliateDreamer]

I am a developer and I just put in a few months developing my own cart, and let me tell you its no easy task.

I think building out to 500K products isn't really an issue, but i'd imagine the back-end order processing/reporting is where things might take a while to develop/design/explain.

My cart is very streamlined and built for expansion so it might be a good starting point for you guys depending on where you want to go? Do you have a rough spec?

My cart is built on ASP.NET MVC (no more ugly web control output and viewstate!), IIS7, Sql server (or any db really as I used nHibernate), and jQuery for the UI.
Site search uses Solr so you get search faceting also.

[MartinWann]

I recommend Magento too. Anyway 500k of products you can migrate with cart2cart.