Drupal guy, should I use Ubercart or learn a new ecommerce package?

Question

Im a big Drupal fan which is why Ubercart is the obvious choice for me when it comes to ecommerce. Ive made a couple of Ubercart sites and I havn't been massively impressed.

Ubercart doesn't seem very powerful when you need extensive business logic, can be hard to theme and has javascript reliance. Admittedly ive only played with others like magento and zencart, but Ubercart doesn't seem to lead in its field the way Drupal does in its.

Im reluctant to learn a new ecommerce package due to the time required, but the javascript reliance alone makes me wonder if I have to. Has anyone else had a Drupal background and faced a similar dilemma with ecommerce?

Thanks

Answer 1

I haven't had to go into it myself, but my understanding is that the Commerce project is what a lot of future effort in this area is going to center on.

Regarding your business logic point in particular, Commerce is intended to work similarly to Drupal itself as a framework to build things on(so a lot of functionality comes from further add-on modules) rather than trying to give you an all-in-one solution that necessarily has a bunch of unstated assumptions and limitations built in.

Answer 2

In my opinion only Magento is serious out of the open source ecommerce solutions. The business logic is extensive but it takes a long time to learn the skills needed to integrate it with other systems, e.g. for automatic stock updates.

Stick with Magento, it will be around for a while and when you have one system working you will be able to re-theme it, put new products in and use it on fresh projects. In that way the initial setup/learning is re-used.