I’ve been asked to put together an online store for a local motorcycle accessory shop. They’ve got a few thousand products, but they won’t do that many sales, it’s more about just showing potential customers everything they have in store + picking up a few leeched online sales while they’re at it.
They want to use PayPal for all transactions.
Should I just set them up with Shopify + a custom template, or setup a VPS + ZenCart/osCommerce/whatever? If the latter, what’s the hotness lately?
If they could be swayed to switch to Google Checkout, this couldn’t be much simpler:
I’d go with shopify (no ssl certs, worrying about storage of personal info, configurations, updates..)
That’s what I was thinking. It’d also be easy for them to maintain it themselves (they’re friends, so more interested in helping them out than getting follow-on business in this case)
fishbulb: Google Checkout isn’t used much in Australia. Last I checked they didn’t even let us be sellers (though i’ll see if that’s changed).
And yeah, i’m well used to Drupal, so that might be a good option if I go self-hosted.
Shopify for basic
Magento for something more complex
I’m working on a Magento store now:
Thoughts on Magento and resources/hosting costs? I haven’t kept up with it in a while, but besides the steep learning curve, speed/performance issues and hosting costs associated seemed to be the biggest bitches.
Anything changed in that regard?
|
Thoughts on Magento and resources/hosting costs? I haven’t kept up with it in a while, but besides the steep learning curve, speed/performance issues and hosting costs associated seemed to be the biggest bitches.
Anything changed in that regard? |
It’s still not an ideal solution for someone on shared hosting. Its resources were never really taxing enough to cause problems beyond that, though.
It does have better caching now, though. And they’ve made it easier to cache programmatically, which means you can more easily cache extension elements and data.
See, if it was actually called Magneto I would use it no matter how much it sucked. Then when clients asked me about their cart particulars, I would just roar "Maaaaaagnetooooo" and punch them in the dick.
Win/Win, as far as I’m concerned.