I’ve been looking around for a shopping cart that fits my needs.  I like free stuff so I generally search for open source products before I search for paid products.  I’ve played around a lot with OScommerce and stumbled across Magento Commerce a while back.  This is what I think about Magento:Out of the box Magento seems to have a lot more goodies than OScommerce.  With Oscommerce you would have to install a lot of contributions in order to have some of Magento’s out of the box features.  Magento has a lot better SEO capabilities than OScommerce, which is a huge deal to me.  Other features include:

• Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. For example: Percent Discount | Fixed Amount Discount | Free Shipping | Buy x, get y free. | Buy x, get y with percent or fixed amount discount | Buy x, get free shipping on order | Buy x, get percent discount | Buy x, get fixed amount discount.
• Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
• Free Shipping Option
• Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
• Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
• Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
• Search Engine Friendly URL’s
• URL Rewrites
• Recently Viewed Products
• Recently Compared Items
• New Items Promotional Tool
• Up-sells in Shopping Cart
• Cross-sells on product pages
• Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
• Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
• RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
• Auto-generated Site Map
• Google Site Map
• Polls
• Newsletter Management

You might be thinking, wow, Magento must rock!  Before you get to excited, let me tell you what I don’t like about it.  Magento was not created for the average person.  I consider myself pretty savvy  when it comes to installing stuff like shopping carts.  Magento was made for the kind of people who work at the Mac Store.  You know, those really smart people who all look the same.  I couldn’t figure out how to do some of the simplest tasks with Magento.  I can install mods on Oscommerce, I can make my own WordPress themes from scratch, yet I can’t seem to figure out jack with Magento.  It doesn’t matter how great the gadgets are, if you can’t use the gadgets it’s worthless.  If you can figure out Magento, it might be a great shopping cart for you.  All I know is I’ve spent hours trying to make sense of Magento and got nowhere. 

I finally figured out what I was doing wrong with Magento.  I have to take back some negative words that I said about Magento.  I haven’t totally gone through Magento 100% yet so I may still have some negative things to say about it, but as of right now, I think Magento is a million times better than osCommerce.  I aslo think that Magento can hold it’s own with paid carts.  I have used CS-Cart.  CS Cart does have more features than Magento, but for being  a free cart, holy cow!  It has some nice features.

Tags: Magento, Magento Commerce, Open Source Commerce, Open Source Ecommerce, osCommerce