How to identify a scalable (and appropriate) eCommerce platform for a medium-sized company? [duplicate]

Question

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Which Ecommerce Script Should I Use?

Maybe you can help me identify a scalable (and appropriate) eCommerce platform for a client of ours, looking to enhance their online sales. I've read the ecommerce guidelines here and am looking to further explore this, relative to my specific situation.

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A little background information:

The company's main focus has been selling to retailers, boutiques, etc., but is now looking to sell directly to the consumer--which is where I come in... to re-design their site (currently a quasi-eCommerce, quasi-informational page) into a full blown eCommerce site--quality wise (not necessarily feature wise) on par with Amazon. I'm doing my homework to isolate the best options for the entire team to evaluate.

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I'm a CSS ninja and blossoming web developer, but still fairly new to eCommerce, so I'd love to get the StackExchange community's feedback.

• I'm curious to find out the pros and cons (with a particular interest in security, and scalability) of a hosted platform (eg. 3dcart), versus an open-source platform (eg. Prestashop). For example, is it worth paying $250/mo. for Magento's 'professional' edition? How do Opencart and Prestashop compare with 3dcart for a medium-sized company?

• What are the headaches associate with the best options; maintenance, versatility, community/customer support, etc.

• Uptime and server responsiveness. Do paid hosted solutions offer high grade servers, or is a dedicated server and do-it-yourself approach better?

This are just some of the questions that are coming to mind, but hopefully you can see the overarching theme of where I'm coming from, offer some advice, and suggest some platforms to explore.

Here are some features/notes:

• Inventory is currently done manually (due to sales currently being so modest,) but I imagine data feed / accounting integration will be need to be available.

• The site will need to be available in multiple languages

• Payment processing is currently handled internally, because inventory is not automated, which suggests inventory management is another key factor to take into consideration (my client was quoted $20,000 to integrate inventory management... I think we can do much better than that;) as I currently understand, the issue is that not all sales are done online.

• Promotion support, user-reviews, product ratings, and a fully customizable front-end are just about mandatory.

Keep in mind our target launch is Jan. 1st, and I've never worked with any of these platforms (other than 3dcart briefly)--but if some help from a specialist needs to be factored into the budget, that isn't completely out of the question. This also suggests to me that having a paid solution could be helpful, having a 'customer/technical support' team available.

We don't know how successful this endeavor will be, and currently my client receives 200 hits with a handful of sales daily; should our vision succeed, their daily traffic and sales should jump substantially... and we want to be prepared for this and not have pursued an eCommerce solution that cannot easily scale.

I earnestly appreciate your time, and look forward to anyone's input!

Julian

Answer 1

A lot of this comes down to the old question of whether to use an existing service/product, or develop it yourself.

Pros of using an existing product/service are:

• quick to launch
• community of users to provide support and feedback
• cost effective
• will probably do 95% of what you want out of the box

Cons of using an existing product/service are:

• although the existing product/service will probably do 95% of what you want, the remaining 5% can be very, very difficult.
  
  • If it's a hosted 3rd party service, it may be impossible.
  • If it's a downloadable, installable open-source solution, it may be next to impossible to implement without learning how the product works, and it will almost certainly be very time-consuming
• User interfaces (both front end and back end) are often designed to satisfy everyone, and end up satisfying no one.
  • For the front end, being innovative in user experience can be difficult
  • For the back end, having something that doesn't confuse the user with the variety of options is desirable.

Ideally, building your own system using a core or framework that you're familiar with is the best approach (given time, money, expertise).

Looking at your timeline, i'd say that for a Jan 1st launch, your only choice is a hosted 3rd party product -- i don't think you'll have time to get something built, or installed/customised in time. Also, it takes care of things such as PCI compliance, which can be expensive and time consuming to get right, especially if you are handling credit card data yourselves (i'm not sure if this is what you mean by 'handling payment processing internally'.

There's so much more to say about this, but i'll stop rambling now. Feel free to ask follow up questions.

Final word: given the short timeline, work hard to set expectations in your organisation, remove inessential features, and consider a phased approach.

Answer 2

I'm posting this as an answer because it's too long to fit in the comments, but it's really a reply to JulianDroid's comment:

First off--thanks a lot for this input guys... it's definitely a unique position to be diving head first into a fairly high profile project, but being super green to ecommerce. I'm fairly new to PHP, but I've heard that Magento takes weeks (months?) to familiarize yourself with... I wonder what features Magento offers over Prestashop, because if it's truly a better choice, our client is probably okay with us taking a more practical-in-the-longrun approach. I'd hate to be 2 weeks deep into Magento, and not be able to add 2 fields to the order page to accommodate our client's vision

One of the reasons I switched from home-rolled (long, long ago) e-commerce stores to Magento is that it's a really robust solution. It's a bit bulky largely because it's designed to meet the needs of most store owners without needing any custom coding. So most customizations (e.g. custom fields, custom attributes, custom product types, web services, pricing rules, payment methods, etc.) can be done via the admin area. And most common features (tags, user reviews, Google Base integration, parcel tracking, etc.) are already built into the system. So for 99% of store owners out there, it's very user-friendly, and you'll find Magento will do everything you want with minimal difficulty. It's also designed with a very extensible architecture such that, if you're familiar with the system, you can customize it however you want simply by writing a custom module for it (of which there are a ton).

The down side to all of this is that it's got a fairly complex architecture, so it takes a while to learn the API, the file structure, the EAV model, the templating system, etc. Unlike managing the store, which has a very useful and thorough user guide, developing for Magento can be quite intimidating at first, and you've got very little documentation to guide you.

So that's the dichotomy. For 99% of customizations and business needs, it will take you no more than half a day to set up through the admin panel. But if your needs fall into that other 1% that requires a custom module, then it's going to be a lot more work initially than lighter e-commerce solutions. Luckily, there are modules for almost everything and it's only the initial learning curve that is hard.

So I can't speak for Prestashop, but I would take a look at the demo Magento store/admin area and see if it's got everything you need. If not, search Magento Connect for a module that you could use.