What are the best enterprise level hosting and/or ecommerce platforms?

[Tonyd23]

Greetings,

I was wonder what are some of the best enterprise level hosting and/or eCommerce platforms for Mid Size Companies?

Thanks,

Tony

[icecarats]

It's really going to depend on a lot of things. A good thing to do would be to draw up a list of what you want the platform to accomplish and then start triaging from there. In my mind these are the important questions:

• Open Source or For Pay? I'm not especially impressed with a lot of the OSS solutions out there (e.g. osCommerce) but the advantage they do have is that the developer base is enormous. This in part depends on the IT resources within your organization. If you don't have dedicated developers it'd probably be better to go with an open source app (e.g. osCommerce) and run with hired guns. You will take a hit in terms of flexibility, configurability, and so on, and likely in the long run end up paying more for add ons, extra development, maintenance, etc. than you may have by in-housing.

• Scope of features: What do you want it to do? If it's just connect to payment gateways and receive money then there's several free/low cost solutions out there. But what about order tracking? Auto-emailing on confirmation? Harvesting and sending tracking numbers? Inventory integration? Logistics? Accounting tie-in so you can determine margin and ROI? You need to figure out what you want this application to do. The tighter the scope, the easier it is. Related to this is, how many SKUs? How many categories? Do you need Search?

• SEOability: Several of these platforms offer some kind of SEO integration, with the most basic being control over meta tags/on page elements to reduce duplicate content penalties.Others go whole hog and offer what are essentially complete CMS packages that allow granular control over every page. You need to determine A)what your SEO strategy is and B)your resourcing to support it. There's not much point splashing out cash on an advanced total CMS integrated system if you only have one overworked intern who will be creating content for it.

This wikipedia page is pretty good for breaking down the major features and what's offered:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software

Brief impressions on what I've worked on in the past:

Magento: Very good feature wise, but not newbie-friendly (e.g. you'll need a dedicated developer/contractor). Pricey. Scales up for large very well, large developer pool.

AbleCommerce: Terrible. .NET based. We call it 'baby's first shopping cart' and it shows. Every client I've had that started on AbleCommerce outgrew it in one quarter.

osCommerce: Mediocre. Tons of developers and plug-ins but the can end up being completely unmanageable if not grown properly. PHP based and all the security problems that come with that, and open source code. Last year there was an exploit that was used to attack literally millions of sites because people weren't updating their installations.

Speaking personally I prefer hand-rolled solutions, but we've made so many over the years it's almost second nature.

[dlucasbarnes]

I do eCommerce for a clothing company and for my personal projects; the main things that mattered to me for hosting were:

1. Ability to get at least a little support/direction from my hosting company.

So from personal experience I have be hosted for more than 6 months with dedicated servers on godaddy and 1&1 hosting. I was not really impressed, both had awful customer support/technical assistance. 1&1 was slightly better in that their servers were noticeably more robust than godaddy.

Frequently the main response received from godaddy if you are experiencing any issue is upgrade your server or hosting; but even using their best services you are likely to notice regular slowness on VPS as well as dedicated servers.

2. Compatibility with the CMS or eCommerce solutions I plan on using.

Again another personal example, when I decided to go with Magento as an ecommerce solution at my company, I looked up who had made an effort to be extra compatible with it. I found that hostgator specifically is recommended for magento and advertises on the basis that their servers are 100% compatible from the get go.

On top of this after going with hostgator I have found they by far have the best support, often going above and beyond what they are responsible for as a host and simply solving your problem.

bottom line, do research for hosting companies that work well with specific ecommerce platforms, because they are a big struggle unless you are very familiar with them, they are more difficult to pick up than CMS.

Hope that helps

Lucas

[Sean_Dawes]

Define mid size company?  If you are talking enterprise level you can use something like marketlive which isnt bad.

But even large scale stores are still on what others may deem smaller platforms:

yahoo store - Would not use it but there are some big stores still on it

BigCommerce - Can handle a ton of skus and has ability to customize well for SEO

Open Source projects like Spree Commerce - Built on ruby but prepare to do a lot of custom work.

[Tonyd23]

Thanks, currently we are looking at enterprise level. We have looked at Marketlive but it may be a bit to much other platforms we are looking at are  ShopVisible, Comentum, & Magento.

[Tonyd23]

Thanks for the response.

1. We will probable do somethings For Pay but our open to something OpenSource. We have limited IT Resources at the moment.

2. We currently have 15,000 Skus and are looking for a complete package (except internal search) we want all the bells and whistles for the site (order tracking, muti-level pricing, Packaged Products, Wishlist, Customer who bought this item also bought..... & etc.

3. Currently we are very focused on SEO and are looking for a platform that will CMS integrated system.

[icecarats]

Okay; this is my opinion based advice but I'd suggest staying away from the Open Source solutions then. Some of those solutions can do great stuff, but they're so genericized to meet every potential need that there's a lot of upfront setup and config. Also the management interface is less than ideal for that number of SKUs out of the box. It's certainly doable, but you're getting into 'the custom work might cost more than buying it' territory. I've only worked with 4-5 'off the shelf' applications, but Magento sounds closest to what you want based on my experience. There might be better ones out there though.

Donald Barnes raises a good point too; I directly manage and host all my e-commerce apps, so it's not an issue I've run into. But having a host who understands what your platform needs is an important step too.