Magento ecommerce free or not for what I am going to USE!

Gibbs-UK · 10 Dec 2011 at 11:02

I want the following:

1. Selling
2. Customer tracking progress of order
3. We chatting to customers through live help
4. shopping cart
5. Any of my members adding products & services
6. Having an ADD ON system where they can add things to each product, for example they buy a wooden box standard,but canadd features and colours their choice but the price increases with each extra
There is more but I think I have the main objective in that list above.

So all in all for the main ones above do I need to pay for any extionsions or what not as I am currently thinking of using nopcommerce, what do you guys think?

SMB30 · 10 Dec 2011 at 12:11

We use magento at work, it does pretty much everything on the list except the live help which I'm confident you should be able to get an add-on for.

As for members adding products do you mean give them admin access? Otherwise you will need an add-on for that as well.

Gibbs-UK · 10 Dec 2011 at 12:33

Does these add ons cost money and is Magento Opensource or not?

By the way much appreciated from your help!

SMB30 · 10 Dec 2011 at 12:36

Magento is open-source so completely free yes, as for the add-ons it will depend on what you can find.

You may well find a free one that suits your needs or may have to shell out for a more expensive one.

http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/ is a good place to start for extensions (add-ons in Magento speak).

Gibbs-UK · 10 Dec 2011 at 14:52

Would you say Magento is better than Nopcommerce?

Gibbs-UK · 10 Dec 2011 at 19:21

Anyone here ever heard of Nopcommerce

SMB30 · 11 Dec 2011 at 17:35

Never used nopcommerce so no idea sorry! You would probably be best to try both and see which one suits your needs the best.

HTMLHugo · 11 Dec 2011 at 21:13

Gibbs-UK said:
Anyone here ever heard of Nopcommerce

I use NopCommerce for all my sites, it does the job and its simple to use and change etc.

has its issues but i still use it for its ease of use.

Did look at magento once but was put off by the effort involved learning new stuff.

As it is ive got 6 or so sites using nop commerce and a few programs / tools in the background for adding stock to all sites at the same time etc.

Most people from my experience use Magento, the reasons why im not sure.

.:SAmSuNG:. · 12 Dec 2011 at 00:48

I tried a few and opencart seemed the easiest to figure out imo. I heard Magento is quite heavy?

Gibbs-UK · 13 Dec 2011 at 12:07

Magento is really very hard to use, so I am going Nopcommerce.

Izi · 13 Dec 2011 at 19:16

nopCommerce is great, much younger than Magento but development work is going at some pace.

suarve · 16 Dec 2011 at 15:54

From the perspective of a client (E.g. a none web person) updating a Magento it's insane. Magento has literally brought some of clients to their knees. It's bloated and very slow unless you pay for some premium hosting.

Zero thought has gone into the fact that a person controlling the store could well be someone who is not a developer.

I raged about Magento a little on my blog recently too

http://www.web-design-talk.co.uk/440/magento-ecommerce-case-study/