TulipTools Internet Business Owners and Online Sellers Community

My take on open source ecommerce scripts.

osCommerce and its off-shoots oscMax, CRELoaded, and Zen Cart are outdated and poorly coded and belong in 2003 not 2009. PrestaShop has modern features, plus design changes and adding mods are a breeze compared to the osC based carts, but it's still buggy. None of them can scale if your business grows.  None of them are suitable for anything but low traffic entry level stores.

If you're not planning on staying small forever you have 3 (or 4) very good free open source choices:  Magento, and.........

My favorite: Apache's OFBiz: http://ofbiz.apache.org/ --used by DKNY, Steiner Sports, 1-800-Flowers

It includes:

• catalog management
  
• pricing management
  
• order management
  
• customer management
  
• warehouse management
  
• fulfillment
  
• accounting
  
• work effort management
  
• content management
  
• a point of sales module
  

OXID eShop:
http://www.oxid-esales.com/en/products/c...ty-edition
feature list (.pdf file): http://www.oxid-esales.com/files/product...eShop4.pdf -used by several large German ecommerce stores

A distant 4th for larger ecommerce businesses is the mod_perl driven Interchange -it's been around since 1995 but lacks several of the out-of-the-box features of the above 3 carts  -used by backcountry.com
http://www.icdevgroup.org/i/dev/index?id=aApsdQPe&mv_pc=79

Great post. Sure a lot more informative than what I got at other sites. 

I've decided to give Magento a whirl on one of my sites - great features and good community support.

I just wanted to notate a couple of things about installing Magento.

1) Don't follow the instructions on the site. Evidently the software updates are ahead of the installation instructions. The current Full Release (v. 1.3.2.3) package includes the downloader and sample data. Skip the instructions and just download the compressed file to your cpanel and unzip it.

2) I double verified w/ my host to make sure that stated environment requirements were in order, I've encountered one that is not stated up front: MySQL must support InnoDB.

I'm not installed yet as I'm waiting for a reply from my host and am hoping that he'll choose to support InnoDB.

I had to goof around with permissions as initially I was encountering a 500 error and couldn't get to the installation interface. With my host I had to chmod the Magento directory to 755 and files (index.php) to 644.

Anyway, them's some notes that might be helpful to others.

Well, I can't really see much in the OFBiz Community. The thing that worries me is the price down the road.

I'm thinking about installing Magento and thanks for the tips. I just can't handle the bugs with buyitsellit. Orders keep coming in, and I can't even restock my store. The more I sell the more I notice glitch after glitch, and I just can't take it anymore!

I need something stable that won't go to hell every time Tomas decides to change this or that. The improvements are never fully tested and cause havoc for sellers like me needing to have a working store 24/7.

some newer free open source carts:

Satchmo (python/django) ...used by ToysRUs Australia
http://www.satchmoproject.com/

Spree (ruby on rails)
http://spreecommerce.com/

nopCommerce (asp)
http://www.nopcommerce.com/FeatureList.aspx

Batavi (php) ...former osCommerce developers
http://www.batavi.org/