Ask HN: Build Site vs Use Magento for eCommerce site? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Build Site vs Use Magento for eCommerce site?

6 pointsvolandovengo15 comments

Hey there - I'm building a really simple eCommerce site. I'm a good coder but don't want to do work for work's sake. For those of you who have worked with Magento, would you recommend using it vs. building your own Ruhy or PHP site? Have any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

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I think theres better in between solutions. Magento is a full featured amazon type site. Its a beast on its own. If you want a simple store, you can do yourself then look at spree. If you want something simple and fast, out of the cart look at shopify or yahoo ecommerce solutions. I think theres more to running a store than just hosting code, such as worrying about payment solutions, and overall security. Thats why I would first suggest paying for something like shopify or yahoo, and see if you can generate the business needed to rationalize going with a solution like Magento.

Thanks for the pointers and the quick reply. I'll look spree up. If I go with something like paypal to handle the checkout process, do I still need to worry about general security? Much thanks :).

If you're looking to build something really simple, I wouldn't touch Magento with a ten foot pole.

My recommendation? Look into FoxyCart, CS-Cart, Shopify, BigCommerce, Interspire - in that order. You will be very happy.

thanks for the suggestions. I will look into them :)

I built a magento ecommerce site about 1 year ago. Here's a quick summary of my experience:

Pros - Beautiful themes out of the box - Easy to setup initially (i.e. payment plug-ins,etc)

Cons - Extremely slow on a shared host (i.e. netfirms) - If your host is slow, using the admin panel to manage the content is painful

The performance issue killed it for me. Unless you can spend some more money on a good hosting service, I'd stay away from it. Otherwise, it's pretty awesome out of the box.

thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)

I recently built a site using the CartThrob module for ExpressionEngine:

http://www.cartthrob.com

http://www.expressionengine.com

I've also saw this recently, but haven't looked into it much beyond the web site. Might be worth taking a look:

http://lemonstandapp.com/

thanks for the pointers.

You may want to describe what "really simple eCommerce site" really means. Is it going to grow in the near future perhaps? The simplest conceivable eCommerce site in my mind is some cart component and single form checkout process that just compiles an order and sends the owner/clerk in an email.

What you describe is pretty much what I envisioned. It would be simple in the following sense: - there will be no cart, buying an item shoots them to the checkout process - we will only list a single item/day

If that is all you are after, Magento is not worth the tradeoff - it is supremely robust but its code and database schema is just too complex to let you do simple things easily.

You could try Open Cart, it's quite a modern PHP cart with paypal etc built in.

Thanks for all the pointers. I now realize that all I want is a payment processor which will allow me to keep the user on my site while they enter their payment details. I don't believe that I can do this with paypal. Any ideas?

You can do this with paypal, you just have to code the integration yourself. Can be as simple as having a form POST different values to the paypal API then redirecting to your site.

I looked into this. Seems like to keep them on my site, I would need to get a SSL certificate installed on my server which doesn't seem fun or cheap for that matter. Thanks all the same :)

beautiful - i will look into this. thanks

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