A REALLY Good E-Commerce Question
I want to set up a website with a Content Management System and an e-Commerce component. I've heard really good things about Magento, WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal. My head is spinning with all of my options. Which should I choose?
This is my favorite question, EVAR. I geek out on stuff like this. This is a person who's started doing their homework on the available systems, when information overload set in. Here's my no b-s review of the big boys of PHP based open-source e-Commerce systems.
The suggestion.
While a WordPress/ Magento site will give you a seamless look and feel on the front end, the systems still (well, as of 9 months ago when I did the last integration) require separate logins. The LazzyMonk plugin is a really good first step at a best-of-both-worlds integration. The product crunching power of Magento and the blog domination - slash - CMS capabilities of the indomitable WordPress. That is, if you are thinking of taking on the likes of Amazon or Buy.com.
The low down.
If you are considering carrying more than two or three hundred products, Magento is definitely the product I would recommend. It has a very robust interface and was designed specifically for larger online stores. It has impressive features for product manipulation, tax calculation and reporting. However, if your store will carry fewer items, I would definitely suggest Joomla! with it's VirtueMart plugin. VirtueMart is also a very robust system, but designed specifically for stores with fewer items (it tends to get very slow when more than three to four hundred items are added). Another consideration is WordPress's WP e-Commerce plugin. It has the capability to handle similarly sized stores to Joomla!'s VirtueMart, and has been around long enough to gain significant positive praise within the WordPress community as a viable e-commerce option.
Magento, with all of it's rave reviews and feature-rich functionality set can be very slow, depending on the server on which it is installed, even with few items. Joomla!, by default, is a faster system. WordPress is generally as fast or faster (response time-wise) as Joomla!, but has a more user-friendly interface. Drupal, from my experience, while very stable and also more responsive than many other systems out there, generally lacks the ability to be easily extended (the code used to build Drupal is just...ugly); causing problems when changes need to be made to code when a new feature or functionality is required.
The real-world.
I will say that the fastest option to have up and running would be WordPress + Instinct's WP e-commerce plugin or Joomla + VirtueMart. They will both handle stores up to three hundred (ish) items with relatively few problems and meet the goal of a single sign-on system. A best-of-breed hybrid between WordPress and Magento would be my suggestion for a store carrying over three hundred items, however, the goal of a single sign-on system will not be met.
The caveat.
A final consideration for portability; if you decide to initially go with a "less powerful system", be aware that while all of these options have mechanisms for exporting their data, there isn't (yet) an internet standard for the way product, customer or sales data is to be laid out, so there would be a cost in transferring from one system to another, if you wanted to migrate in the future (IE-if you get big enough to warrant a larger system).
All systems are built with a specific goal in mind. Need help deciding which is right for you? Contact kiveo today and we'll be happy to walk you through the process. Disagree or have other suggestions? Hit me up at blog@kiveo.net.
