Re: FN-FORUM: Ecommerce Round up

date posted 5th March 2008 13:27


On 5 Mar 2008, at 13:50, Tony Crockford wrote:
>
> On a personal note Xebit ltd are planning to dabble in some online
> selling, (car parts and Racing Simulators set-ups) so I thought I'd
> ask for some suggestions and draw on your collective experience for
> the best way to get started...
>
> So, what shop builder, payment gateway etc are we all using/
> planning on using for our next project and why? (I was looking at
> Tradingeye, but it seems to be getting more expensive)


Here are some open source CMS options with Drupal. The two main
modules are e-Commerce (http://www.drupalecommerce.org/) and Ubercart
(http://www.ubercart.org/). Here is a link to a comparison between
both of them (http://alligatorsneeze.com/diving-drupal-e-commerce-
ubercart-vs-e-commerce-comparison), note that eCommerce 3.4 was
released after this comparison was made.

e-Commerce seems to be the option for developers since it's endlessly
extensible and customizable. Some of the drawbacks is that the
interface might be confusing for some people, and you need a lot of
theming to make it look good. They have a lot of documentation about
their API, and also have an IRC channel for support. I don't know if
this was fixed in the latest release, but e-Commerce doesn't have a
good one page checkout system.

Ubercart is very easy to setup, and looks nice straight out of the
box. It has some jQuery built in that gives it some nice interface
effects, although some people might argue that this makes the system
slower. Ubercart has a very active community, it's quite easy to get
help in their forums and they have a lot of documentation. Some of
the weak points of Ubercart is that its still in beta release and is
not as customizable or has a s menu sub-modules as e-Commerce.
Ubercart, unlike e-Commerce, has a very nice one page checkout system.

Another option with Drupal, is to integrate it with Zen Cart, if
integrated seamlessly it gives you a very powerful option. Here is a
link to a studio that this combination successfully (http://
www.gortonstudios.com/portfolio/gertens).

These are some of the things I've heard in IRC, the Drupal forum, and
read in articles. I have never used any of those systems for a
commercial website, but I have installed them in my localhost and
played around with them.

HTH

--

Nicolas Borda
-------------------------

http://nic.ipwa.net/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nborda