Looking for suggestions on the most versatile shopping cart software that can manage 10's of thousands of products. Need a cart where we can find developers that want to work with the cart and where there is good support. If you have an e-commerce store, and you had it to do all over again, which cart would you use?
ergophobe
6:22 am on Oct 11, 2012 (gmt 0)
I use Ubercart. I would probably use Drupal Commerce, but I only use those because I can leverage existing Drupal skills. Barring that, I would go for one of the major carts, possibly one of the hosted solutions like Business Catalyst or something like that so I wouldn't have to deal with all the hosting issues.
lorax
7:22 pm on Oct 11, 2012 (gmt 0)
It sort of depends upon how many products and what sort of flexibility you need with product configurations, shipping rules, and payment processors. Oh.. and method of implementation, custom PHP pages or static HTML or within a CMS?
Robino
9:16 pm on Oct 18, 2012 (gmt 0)
Checkout Demandware.
It's best to really think about what you need now and a few years from now.
wyche128
1:32 pm on Oct 20, 2012 (gmt 0)
Magento Community Edition is the way to go. Open source and large community for support.
pbradish
7:30 pm on Oct 22, 2012 (gmt 0)
I second Demandware
Robino
7:41 pm on Oct 22, 2012 (gmt 0)
Magento Community is not suited for tens of thousands of products. In fact, I'm not even sure their Enterprise edition is either.
But obviously much depends on what you intend to do w/ the site in terms of API calls, extension integrations and various customizations.
It can get expensive and out of control very quickly. ;)
skatingtoolman
10:41 pm on Oct 22, 2012 (gmt 0)
I contacted Magento and they have not tested their cart with customers that have over 1.7 million products. They told me that their cart would not suffice. We will exceed that. We are sort of like US Auto Parts or another type of supplier that has millions of parts.
Robino
11:54 am on Oct 24, 2012 (gmt 0)
I'd definitely check out Oracle, IBM and Demandware.
Be prepared to end up paying double the initial signed price and for it to take 2-3 times as long as promised.
Bewenched
7:46 am on Nov 9, 2012 (gmt 0)
Honestly, you'd probably do better in the long run hiring a professional developer in house... out of the box carts have flaws.
Just found a major one in a competitors site... found it by accident. Their site creates an xml file that I assume is what powers the product pages... anyhow found a link to it in google. I was able to pull all their product data in one link. Blew my mind. I deleted the file.. it was too tempting. <chanting .. I like my good karma.. I like my good karma>
particleman
3:21 pm on Nov 11, 2012 (gmt 0)
As a developer I've always created my own with very specific requirements. A lot of carts are very generic to fit many needs. I tend to agree with bewenched, at least examine the cost of having one developed. Sounds like you have a few requirements already (being able to handle a lot of products).
wrockca
8:05 pm on Jan 6, 2013 (gmt 0)
What do you guys think about Prestashop
[edited by: lorax at 3:02 pm (utc) on Jan 7, 2013] [edit reason] removed link [/edit]
Marshall
10:48 pm on Jan 6, 2013 (gmt 0)
While I always promote Ecommerce Templates, I am not sure if it can handle the number of products you mentioned. That being said, I would also suggest hiring a developer to create a cart specific to you needs.
Marshall
ssgumby
2:33 am on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)
the issue with creating your own cart is the PA-DSS requirements. Very costly to get the cart certified from what ive been told.
jrockfl
3:23 pm on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)
It's not just the actual shopping cart application that needs to be looked at, you need to look at hardware too. You need to consider, os, web server, database server, etc. Also, the architecture of the database. Correct use of indexes, primary keys, etc...
I'm a senior .net developer and I wrote our e-commerce application. We have 2 servers right now, 1 database server and 1 web server.
We get up to 1000 concurrent users.
ssgumby
9:53 pm on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)
thats quite impressive jrockfl, im a senior java developer and also do some architect work, but I wouldnt attempt my shopping cart, at least not with all the bells and whistles I would need.
How long did it take you to develop and did you have help?
jrockfl
10:39 pm on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)
thank you ssgumby. It really is not that difficult in my opinion. I did all of the .net programming and the majority of the javascript with jQuery.
All of the design work was contracted out to a designer. He provided me the mockup of each page in PSD and I had another company slice it up and give me the html, images, css.
I took that and did all of the programming. I have been working on it for over 2 years adding little features here and there. (text me when my order ships or tweet me when my order ships)
Sure, I could have go something off the shelf (commercial or open source) but at least this way I know the application and can make the changes I need.
wrockca
11:44 pm on Jan 7, 2013 (gmt 0)
Or you can just rent a Virtual Server for less the price and they support the hardware and security patching (so really no cost for servers) expand ram with a click of a button and with another click you have all the backup storage to support your company.
