Magento OR OpenCart OR osCommerce OR Zen Cart OR WP e-Commerce OR WooCommerce

[JordanBrown]

Which cms is good for health product website (selling).?

[LesleyPaone]

Have you considered Prestashop? It is pretty popular also.

[JordanBrown]

I am looking for something easy to maintain and good in SEO like wordpress. Is Prestashop is easy to work ?

[LesleyPaone]

It is pretty easy to maintain, easier than Magento and cheaper as well. It is also more powerful than the other options you mentioned. As for SEO it is on par with everything else SEO wise, it really comes down to how you structure the site, how SEO optimized the template is and things of that nature. There is a hosting company called Cloudways.com you can sign up for a free account with out having to enter a CC and try Prestashop out, they have an auto installer.

[DeanAndrews]

I guess it depends on what works for you as any of the platforms you mentioned are capable of selling most physical products.

I've tried out quite a few (not tried Prestashop sorry Lesley) and my personal favourite is WooCommerce, If you can work with php, I suggest you create a child theme and make all code changes in the child functions.php/css then you have a framework that is fairly simple to upgrade.

[GPainter]

Don't forget Cs-Cart,  its very easy to use and we offer some very good packages, bit of self promotion we're one of the top cs-cart retailers so give me a PM if you want further details.

[Matt-Williamson]

Hi Jordan,

I have worked with all of the platforms that you mention and my personal favourite is Magento. I find it to be very SEO friendly and there are lots of great tweaks that you can make to help with things like site speed. I also find the wide variety of extensions is very good with Magento. Some platforms are also more difficult than others for setting things like Google Analytics ecommerce tracking up - Magento is super easy

Hope this helps

[PaddyDisplays]

First you want to decide if you want open-source vs a closed platform.  As a general rule open source need more work and at least some technical knowledge, but there are cheap/free and you have complete freedom with them.  Closed platforms are generally easier to setup and easier to maintain but are more expensive (up front costs at least) and because its closed you have little freedom ( at the mercy of the company the develops it)

Note that is a very general rule and every platform is different and there is always the argument (normally put forward from closed platforms) that open source is can be  expensive in the long term because the costs of upgrading/maintaining it, espically if you our sourcing that work out.

I have used Zen-cart alot. big bonus is its free, its got a nice community (but not huge) and its a decent platform, but can require a bit of work to get it the way you want. big negative is that it can't do stock control for products with options eg you have a shirt that comes in an option of red or black, it just tracks the shirt stock not the amounts of red and black shirts.  If you are not using it for stock control then its not an issue (as I believe they are working on a fix for this) .   Over all Zen-cart is a good start if you have a low budget.

Starting to use Magneto, and even though its also "open source" it frees alot more commercial than zen-cart, but has a far bigger community and tons of extensions.  It still need a bit of work to get setup but it alot more flexible than zencart and has more 3rd party modules. There is a reason its the biggest E-commerce system in the world.

Never used Open-cart, but I did look into it and it looks nice ( but a know of a competitor that moved from open-cart to magento enterprise)

Another one I looked at is visualsoft, people that I know use it are happy with it as is easy to use and because it a closed platform you don't have to worry about alot of the technical stuff.  The basic price for it is ok, but they really  get you with the addon and can soon add up on price (that and you don't have the freedom of opensource is the reason I did not go with them)

I'm sure there are more platforms that are just as good if not better that the ones above, but I can only tell you about the ones I have experience with 

[ogdcorp]

I would recommend PrestaShop, its becoming more and more popular.
We currently are doing SEO for our clients using Prestashop with great results.

[LesleyPaone]

Nice, I see you are local to Prestashop's office. Are you a member of the Prestashop forum?

[JordanBrown]

Hey, what about Wordpress? No one recommend it. I only familiar with wordpress.

Is any of the above cms is as easy as wordpress? For which I can go with

[JordanBrown]

Hi Paddy,

I will buy theme from themeforest.net. So except theme, what I need to buy? I never used any selling CMS. So don't know about the cost.

Like wordpress, I only need to spend money on theme, rest I an do myself.

[JordanBrown]

Hi Lesley,

Do I need to pay monthly for Prestashop? I have hosting, I will buy theme, what else?

[KeriMorgret]

I personally use Wordpress with Foxycart.

Some things to think about are: do you need to keep track of inventory with this system? Do you need to display to the user how much product you have available? Do you need to take coupons? Issue gift certificates? Calculate shipping for a wide variety of package sizes and products? Offer multiple shipping methods? Offer sales to multiple countries? Deal with multiple currencies? Allow backorders? Set something as out of stock? What kind of sales reports are you looking for from the system?

[JordanBrown]

I am looking for very simple product page which includes product images, description price, buy now and discount.

Don't want any inventory etc.

[LesleyPaone]

When clients ask me to use Wordpress for an e-commerce site, I not only say no, I say hell no. Wordpress is not a scalable solution with a myriad of other issues. Let me list the issues I have with Wordpress as an ecommerce store.

Security, it is just not secure. Most ecommerce applications use a two authentication system, not to be confused with a two factor authentication system. Like Prestashop what it does is has a login for the admins and a separate login for the customers. They are not handled by the same code, the same page, or the same system. Wordpress uses only one system, so where an admin would login, so would a client. This is insecure in so many ways in my mind. One, how many password attempts do you wait before you lock someone out? It could be a legitimate user that gets locked out costing you a sale. But at the same time, if you do not lock them out, they can write a script that for days uses different ip addresses to try to crack your admin password. On ecommerce systems most allow you to select an admin directory. Wordpress's is site.com/wp-login. Prestashop or Magento it could be site.com/3490834admin or what ever you feel like using.

Another issue is features. There really are not many, sure there are plugins that are developed by God knows who, but Wordpress was never meant to be an ecommerce platform so it lacks a lot of the valuable features. Most Prestashop sites I work on (I keep using Prestashop not to push it, but it is really the only platform I develop with) only use 2 -4 modules that are not part of the package. Usually they are like an obscure payment gateway, a module that connect to quickbooks, or a shipping module. Stats, products, features, cms, it is all held internally by the application. When it takes 30 modules by 30 different people to make a site, it will be insecure, there are no two ways about it. Something will also conflist as well breaking something. Plus there are not modules for half the features a real ecommerce platform has available for Wordpress. Sure you can sell, can you send time follow emails with coupons? Can you handle shipping products separately from different suppliers? Can you handle warehousing and storing supplier information? Can you import csv files from your suppliers automatically on schedule? It is the things like that when someone opens a shop, they do not take into account. It is a lot easier to flip a switch in the back office of a program to enable a feature than it is to either program it or try to find a module that does it.

The whole idea of Wordpress is insecure when it comes to ecommerce systems. I mentioned the login above, but it is actually the whole foundation of Wordpress. One thing that you will never catch a dedicated ecommerce system doing is executing a server side language in the template. Wordpress's templates are built around PHP with adds another layer of in security. With Prestashop, a template uses variables that are passed from the controller or the module. That way the internal MVC structure is used to execute all of the code. I can only image how upsetting it must be to someone using Wordpress to find out their site was compromised because they downloaded a mailchimp plugin made by coder dude99 and he didn't sanitize the email input. Everything in an ecommerce system is handled through the controller logic, people aren't willy nilly writing code and executing it.

Speed is also an issue, that comes in with the coding quality standards mentioned above. When you are executing all kinds of code, there could be a bottle neck anywhere. Most ecommerce platforms have built in functions for everything code wise and only allow you to use them. Want to access the database? Sure there is a function for that that checks the data for exploits before it is run. One thing I really like about Prestashop that wordpress does not do is how it handles css and javascript. When a module is developed, it has a directory it needs to be in, inside the module. Prestashop then takes the css and js and compiles it into 2 repective files, cutting down your request number and minifying it in the process. Plus it has default support for things such as APC, MEMcache, and CDN servers.

To answer your question above, yes buying a template might be all you need. It really comes down to how you want your business to operate. There is pretty wide payment gateway support standard, but there are some that are not supported. So you might have to buy a payment module.

If you are building this for a client, I would think twice about taking the job, if you don't have any experience with some of this stuff it can be difficult.

[JordanBrown]

Do I need to purchase payment gateway also? or simple paypal will work? (pay and buy)

[LesleyPaone]

Out of the box I think the supported ones are paypal standard and adaptive, blue pay, authorize.net, cod, bank wire, first data, hipay, moneybookers, payment sense. Those are the US ones I remember off the top of my head, but you can get a module for any gateway really. I made one for NMI I have for free download on my site, there is a stripe one floating around too that is free also.

[JordanBrown]

Thank you Lesley for your help.. Very nice of you to write here and answer me..

[LesleyPaone]

No problem, people sharing knowledge is what makes a community great.

To answer your question I missed above, Prestashop is free, all you need it web hosting.