Over the last few years I have been at the mercy of a diabolical e-commerce system, one that was fully table based, written in ASP and had very little support for further developments and system enhancements.
Finally I managed to dedicate some time to researching a new e-commerce system. In most e-commerce systems the core data is there, but it’s getting to it in neat and simple ways that is hard. I believe that any e-commerce system is tweak able but it is the ability to bend and stretch the system features that makes a lion out of a house cat. I researched for a few weeks, and short-listed a few systems, including:
- OpenCart
- ZenCart
- OS Commerce
- Lemonstand
- Magento (Open Source)
- WordPress, CMSMS, Drupal and Joomla (with shopping cart plugins)
After careful deliberation I decided to purchase a license for Lemonstand, a fully comprehensive e-commerce system and have found it to be an absolutely fantastic product. The initial install was a little fiddly, but once it was up and running the system proved relatively simple to configure, and get the core site ‘shop’ up and running.
Imports, Exports and Product Management
Lemonstand makes everything data related incredibly simple. The data import (from CSV) is fairly self explanatory, added to this extra support can be obtained from their large document library. The ability to add multiple products to a variety of structured categories in a single line of data is neat, and relatively simple to explain to clients (when they need to populate a data sheet). The product management section of the system is fantastic allowing each product to have it’s own attributes, options, related products, product groupings as well as standard content, meta data and image(s).
The Support Network
The documentation and forums are exceedingly well resourced despite the time difference on feedback from most of the contributors (as this system is heavily US based). The open sourced module community allows input from people from a host of web related backgrounds.
The Short Fallings
Let’s be honest, no system is perfect, especially one that has evolved over time. There are going to be bugs and inadequacies in any system, but these can be tweaked. My only concern is the amount of PHP knowledge required to achieve relatively simple features with the system. I still dream of an e-commerce system that filters and manages products, categories, manufacturers and attributes as well as WordPress is able to refine and oversee through posts and pages.
