It’s not JUST the shopping cart, it’s the BACKEND that really counts. ALL of these so-called shopping carts (Magento, OSC, Zen…) have absolutely *NO* accounting featutes built-in.

After you spend 1000s of dollars getting your website operational, and you start selling products, it’ll suddenly hit you… What about all the accounting? You are making sales, collecting tax, every transaction REQUIRES auditable accounting!!!

You’ll have to start recording that $1.50 profit you made as taxible income… Huh? Go grab a paper and pencil because you didn’t think things through.

SO: What next? Well, because you unfortunately chose a shopping cart w/o accounting, Magento (and a few others) have so-called “connectors” that interface with QuickBooks, Sage, and even SAP, but they are expensive and require expertise to implement and maintain. Also, they are not perfect, using dissimilar databases, communicate over XMLRPC, etc.

Suddenly, you now have “another” database to backup, another machine to maintain, another consultant to call and pay. Basically, they are all hokey “kludges” that are slow, unreliable, and when you have to troubleshoot “where are my transactions”… A nightmare.

SOLUTION? First choose an ERP *with* ecommerce features, like Apaches OFBiz (Open for Business).

http://ofbiz.apache.org

A SINGLE database (mysql, postgres, even ORACLE!) handles all the ecommerce, accounting, inventory, stock, EVERYTHING. If you need to update the stock inventory, you just go into the catalog manager, update the stock/price and poof, the website has the new information. You want to take a telephone order.. Or you have a brick and morter shop? Well, use the built-in Point OF Sale (POS) terminal that is automatically integrated with your (global) catalog manager. You need to call a customer? Built-in.

You make a sale, OFBiz automatically performs the ecommerce duties (credits your merchant account) *AND* updates your general ledger, stock, etc.

It’s all java based, so it’s secure/safe, unlike those PHP security nightmare based shopping carts that are dog-slow (like Magento).

People. It’s *NOT* just about the shopping cart… That should be about about 30% of your decision making process. Keep your life simple and look for automated accounting features. None of the above shopping carts have this.

Don’t make the mistake of choosing the shopping cart because it has cool features and templates. Think about how the shopping cart will interface with day-to-day business. If you don’t, your success will be your worst enemy, and you’ll be spending all of your time getting your accounting caught up.

PrestaShop is really a state of the art software. It has everything you need, stock handling, payment modules, localisation editor and so on and so forth, the list of features is so long that you need to check it out yourself. It is VERY nice indeed!

I highly recommend PrestaShop!

OS wouldn’t be so bad if they had better support…..any recommendations on an OS host with at least business hour phone support?

Keeps close to the original source, lots of pre-installed functionality, easily editted, easy to add your own mods but developed enough to use out of the box.

New Version 2.1 coming soon with redesigned admin section.

I have to say I will never recommend anything but Drupal again. Drupal actually gives you a choice of 2 e-commerce systems.

ecommerce – http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce
ubercart – http://drupal.org/project/ubercart

I have used Ubercart many times and I have to say it does what it promises. A few times I have tried to make it do things it was not designed to do and it got a little frustrating but having Drupal as a development platform makes all the difference. If Drupal is good enough for the whitehouse.gov then it is good enough for me.

Drupal + Views module + CCK module + UberCart module makes for a very powerful combo. Cant wait to try out the ecommerce module and compare it to Ubercart

But dont take my word for it, have a look this list of sites Dries Buytaert (the man that started Drupal) has put together – http://buytaert.net/tag/drupal-sites

And lastly let me just say that I will never again use Joomla for anything.

Thanks again.