Yahoo vs. Amazon vs. Magneto vs. WP vs. OsCommerce vs. [X] for selling REAL goods?

EDIT: Magneto = Magento. Me fail Engrish, unpossible...

I have two different Wordpress website clients that do a $1 million plus each in their bricks-and-mortar store sales.

They do well enough that they never wanted an online store - until now. They sell mid-to-high end supplies, equipment, and furniture to architects, designers, decorators and rich people. They probably have 1000 products ea. with 80% overlap.

My question: which eCommerce package to build out for them? They aren't idiots, and can follow instructions, but simplicity goes a long way for them and me.

Their sites are built in WordPress, so obviously I'm comfortable with that, but WP is far from a dedicated eCommerce platform...

I have used Yahoo stores before with other clients, but found working with RTML frustrating. I would prefer to stick with PHP.

Ultimately, I would like to run both sites under one site that I manage, so Magento's admin options sound promising, but I have ZERO knowledge or experience with Magento outside of what I've read in these forums.

Thanks--

 

I wouldn't use WP for an ecommerce platform. There are a few packages that would enable ecommerce on a WP blog, but it's just made for it, and I think you would get much better results with something else.

I would stay away from Yahoo and Amazon. They charge a % of gross sales in addition to a monthly fee. That sort of pricing structure becomes very expensive down the road, and it's almost impossible to switch platform once you're with them. As far as an all-in-one paid service, Volusion is probably the only one I would currently recommend.

Of the 2 software carts, Magento and OSCommerce, both should work well. Both are fairly easy to administer. Both have a ton of existing plugins and modules that can help with everything from shipping, to payment gateway integration, to connecting with a service like facebook. Where they really differ is back-end customizing. It think that Magento is far more flexible, but can be significantly more difficult to make major modifications. The reason is because it is based on the php Zend framework, which takes a fair amount of programming ability to be able to modify. Oscommerce isn't exactly easy, but there's more programmers that can modify it than Magento.

If you have the ability, and are planning for long term, I would prefer to use Magento. I think it's a better code base, and a more secure and stable product than oscommerce. I also think there are better quality designs and I like the checkout system much more than oscommerce. Otherwise, if you do chose Oscommerce, it should still work well. Just make sure you get a good design that doesn't look like the out of the box oscommerce design.

 

Great reply, Jestep, and great Merchant Account blog as well.

The biggest drawback to the free version of Magento seems to be the difficult administration. I don't have time or inclination to muck around in PHP just to get basic things like inventory and UI working.

Biggest drawback to OsCommerce seems to be outdated/sloppy design, not being built to strict CMS standards.

The biggest drawback to Volusion is their being closed-source, ASP.

 

Another vote for Magento.
Very easy to use and lots of options.

 

I will vote for Magento and not vote for Yigal6

Magento is really easy to set up a basic stores. However, if you want to set up more complex store with customized themes, checking out options, payment, shipping, you will need to do more than that. Besides that, you can manage customers, create exports, analyze sale data, etc to improve conversion rate.

WP is nice, but definitely not an e-commerce platform.

If you would like Magento consultant, please visit my blog magentoplazza dot com or email me , I will be very willing to help you out.

 

I will vote for Magento, because i love it

 

Agreed, Magento rocks!. Btw, till the end of April Cart2Cart will add Yahoo Store to their supported list of shopping carts available for migration. So you can migrate all your entities form YStore to any cart you choose.