eCommerce wars: Magento vs osCommerce
We are undoubtedly in times of fiscal ruin. Whole countries are going bust (how does that even happen?) and there is an impending sense of stagflation, or worse, deflation in the air…or even relegation if you are George Dub-ya.
“…Let’s stick to what we know, then, and make cut backs: no investment for a while, let’s just ride it out…” might say a chief decision maker whom, in doing so, will ensure his business only treads water for the foreseeable future.
There’s no need to be so afraid: online sales have allegedly grown this year, as reported over at the Office for National Statistics.
‘…The volume of retail sales increased by 0.9% in October, higher than analysts’ predictions of 0.3%. This represents the biggest monthly rise since November last year.
The highest three-monthly growth was in non-store retailing, which grew by 3.3% from August to October. According to the ONS, this reflects increased sales growth by internet retailers…’
Tapping into that market in the UK is one thing, and is to be commended in the current clime, but shoving open your cyber door to international sales is the really cute move. And, what’s more, it requires only marginally more effort and financial outlay to do so than for solely a UK market.
There are many off-the-shelf ecommerce packages available, but for large and heavily stocked online sites, we at Web-Translations have tended to use Open Source applications, specifically osCommerce and new code on the block, Magento. But which is the best? Well, we have finally mined our way to the core of this blog post, so let’s begin…
I reason the easiest way to do this is with a comparative table, so here it comes:
|
Consideration
|
Weighting (0-10)
|
OS Commerce
|
Magento
|
|---|---|---|---|
|
Support for languages
|
10
|
9
|
8
|
|
Features
|
9
|
5
|
9
|
|
Look & feel
|
8
|
4
|
9
|
|
Ease of maintenance
|
7
|
7
|
6
|
|
Modules & contributions
|
6
|
8
|
4
|
|
Forum activity
|
5
|
8
|
8
|
|
Maturity
|
4
|
7
|
3
|
|
Flexibility
|
3
|
8
|
5
|
|
Compat. w/ payment gateways
|
2
|
8
|
6
|
|
Compat. w/ shipping & couriers
|
2
|
7
|
5
|
|
Integration w/ fulfilment systems
|
2
|
9
|
3
|
|
Total (score x weighting)
|
n/a
|
394
|
394
|
osCommerce….
osCommerce has been around a while and, as such, there is a very well established community whom are fairly responsive to any unfathomable problems you may have, should you post within their forums.
There are also innumerable ‘contributions’ or ‘modules’ to be found on the OS site. These are invaluable and mean your site can be as tailored to your needs as you wish and, importantly, are easy to add owing to osCommerce’s flexibility.
Need a CMS on your site? It’s there. Need to make and dispatch money off coupons? Sorted. Want the increasingly popular lightbox effect on your images? All doable. The modules come with clear instructions and, on the whole, are regularly updated with bug fixes so if you get one that’s a few months old, chances are it’ll work just fine.
But the real beauty of osCommerce is in its palpable willingness to be translated and localised into any language. The structure of the site, written in php and using definitions, means all the text you see on an (unhacked!) osCommerce site is handily stored in reference files which contain only plain text for translation, thus minimising the risk of file corruption by an inexperienced web page translator.
Magento
This new and trail blazing package scores highest for its look and feel, features, and ‘translatability’. The back-end is well organised and most bases are thoroughly covered (as against osCommerce which is fairly basic until modules are added) including re-writable URLs which are a must for a well optimised online store.
There is a great range of user experience enhancing features such as ‘related products’, ‘add to wishlist’ and ‘compare products’. In turn, these also benfit the store owner as the time a consumer spends on your site is proportional to the amount they spend. These such functions are all well administrated from the back-end, with cross referencing being much easier than in osCommerce owing to the emphasis placed on SKU numbers.
Magento, too, has something called ‘Store View’ which, although difficult to get ones head around, affords online shop keepers the ability to set up multiple stores, with the same products, at different prices, and even in different languages, all from one admin area.
As for translating a Magento store - many language packs are already available, meaning all the hard coded static content and navigation (add to basket, subscribe to newsletter, invoices, checkout, my basket etc) is good to go at the click of a button (thankfully, all the while keeping the admin area in your native language).
So, if all that wasn’t enough to at least prick your ears up to the fiscal punch you could be packing with a multilingual eCommerce site, then consider this…
As a nation, we spend more on foreign soil - or in foreign cyber space at least - than any other country: an eye watering £2.3 billion in fact. France and Germany are but mere spots on the horizon in comparison, with overseas sales totalling a meagre £857 million. That gap is expected to close so what’s stopping you from becoming a gleeful recipient of that increased foreign spend?
Nothing. Exactly.
This is, by no means, a comprehensive analysis of the different packages out there, rather a discussion of the ones we are most familiar with and have used extensively. I will be sure to add to this as our experiences grow.
In the meantime, if you have any specific questions about Magento or osCommerce, leave a comment below and I promise I’ll get back to you!
Tags: ecommerce, export, International Trade, magento, oscommerce
January 5th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
As a freelance developer I must say that since Magento was released I simply refuse to do osCommerce (and relatives like xt:commerce) sites.
The Magento code base is *so* much better and so much more flexible, there is no chance I could seriously advise a client to use osCommerce any more.
The community is very active, new community extensions are released by the day.
The weighting on your comparison table is very subjective - I would come up with very different figures. Also, it would be interesting which version of Magento you evaluated, since the core code is very actively maintained (osCommerce: last core release (bugfix only) on the 30th Jan 08).
Another important issue you didn’t even touch in your comparison is how extensions are installed, and how easy it is to upgrade a release. Again, Magento wins easily. With osCommerce, core files have to be edited to even add small features. Magentos architecture offers a real API that allows changing most aspects of the store without even touching a line of core code. That also goes a long way ensuring that future upgrades can be installed without painfully and time-consumingly merging code changes with the upgrade.
Magento upgrades are done with a couple of mouse-clicks (or - if you prefer - a single command line command).
I want to add that I’m not Part of Varien (the company behind Magento), just a freelance web developer.
Hope this helps someone,
Vinai
January 5th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Hi Vinai,
You make some good points - we tested with version 1.1.6 and found various stability issues which I expect have now been fixed. We will update our clients’ sites and update our blog accordingly.
I was impressed with the ease with which contributions can be added to a Magento site, but one contribution irrecoverably damaged one of my sites - but as the maturity of Magento improves, the contributions will undoubtedly become more stable, and the API plugin interface will come into its own.
It would be interesting to know what you would rate differently?
The ease with which Magento can be updated when needed is definately something worth considering when chosing your package.
Thanks!
January 6th, 2009 at 2:51 am
[...] View original post here: eCommerce wars: Magento vs osCommerce | Web-Translations Buzz [...]
January 6th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Some valid points made here, particularly with regards to the amount spent on ‘foreigh soil’
Good stuff.
January 6th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
[...] la traduzione della comparativa fra Magento ed Os Commerce apparsa su questo sito inglese qualche giorno fa. Alla fine del post , le mie considerazioni [...]
January 8th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
[...] has a good writeup discussing the “e-commerce war” between Magento and osCommerce. These are the two [...]
February 23rd, 2009 at 8:02 pm
I got all excited over Magento - but it was too good to be true - I host some sites on a dedicated windows server and getting Magento to run was just not worth the effort…… So thanks to your article here I’m now downloading osCommerce….. fingers crossed it’s more windows friendly
February 25th, 2009 at 11:12 am
With Magneto, I found it to take an AGE to upload via FTP (unless you uncompressed it on the server) and due to the incredible memory useage quite a slow system even on a top-spec dedicated server on a Tier 1 connection!
Both above suggestions are open source, which means anyone can view how it works and then work out ways to exploit sites using them; including taking down a website, stealing personal data, etc etc…
It’s always best to get someone to create an ecommerce solution bespoke. This will be much safer overall.
PS
You stated at the top of this article the following: “We are undoubtedly in times of fiscal ruin. Whole countries are going bust (how does that even happen?)”
This happens due to the fact that our money system is a fraudulet system based on a federal reserve. They make up money out of thin air which is a crime, and ultimately makes money more and more worthless as each day passes. That and the fact that people at the top are stealing from the taxpayers.
There is a video that absolutely EVERYONE MUST SEE that explains about how the money system works and how we have all been duped. It is an American production but it does account for most of the world including Europe. It’s on the Secret Crimes web site secretcrimes.com and is called What Is Money.
http://secretcrimes.com/conspiracy_video.php?vid=46e3929b7
Peace
March 3rd, 2009 at 12:10 am
[...] eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce [...]
March 3rd, 2009 at 1:09 am
[...] eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce [...]
March 4th, 2009 at 2:16 am
[...] eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce [...]
March 20th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
[...] further reading: osCommerce Review osCommerce vs. Zen Cart osCommerce vs. Magento eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce This entry was posted in Web development. Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a [...]
May 6th, 2009 at 2:47 am
I was on my way to install another osCommerce site when I ran across this Magento article from Smashing Magazine: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/05/25-magento-templates-for-your-e-commerce-business/. I spent about an hour researching Magento but couldn’t get past two things: 1) I don’t have much spare time this month to explore something new, like Magento and 2) the server requirements concerned me a bit. So off I go with another osCommerce development project. I will, however, be keeping my eye on Magento though. BG
May 11th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
if you need a oscommerce
webwinkel, go2 My
Webshop
May 27th, 2009 at 7:28 am
I wrote a lot but it wont let me post it
June 1st, 2009 at 9:25 pm
[...] deployed several multilingual ecommerce websites using OS Commerce and Magento, Web-Translations are now helping businesses to save thousands by switching from proprietary CMS [...]
June 4th, 2009 at 1:26 am
Magento has proved to be very powerful application. Large number of retailers is already using it. Now it’s easy as there’s web service which automates the process - Cart2Cart. It moves the data to Magento automatically and accurately. For more details please visit http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com
June 12th, 2009 at 5:39 am
I have spent 5 years with OSCommerce and OScommerce based CRE Loaded (oscommerce with tons of contribution loaded in), and I am really to switch. I have spent the last 2 weeks with Magento and was thrilled to see a cart loaded with great features, CSS based and not bad looking out of the box.
In the end, I gave up. Magento is slow. Magento has 6,000 files and 200 tables in their database, which empty is 20 times larger than OScommerce empty database. It is not going to be the cart for talented amatuers with a good knowledge of HTML, CSS and some php, on a shared server. Look at the showcase carts on the Magento forum. They drag, and a slow cart wears the patience of your customers. Oscommerce is quick and snappy.
In the end, I realized, I can make Oscommerce look like whatever I need. I complain about it, but I can do it. Magento, I’m sure with some dedicated assistance and lots of time, I’ll get it looking like I need, but one thing I will never do, and you will never do is get that overbloated monster to run fast.
Also Magento has some odd quirks. You can’t delete orders for example. Look at all the folks complaining about that on there forum.
June 12th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
Thanks for the useful article. Our company has been looking for an alternative to osCommerce, as we find that the back-end is not very user friendly. We landed on Magento in our research, and found that the back-end is much better and easier to work with. However, the issues everyone is mentioning about Magento being more demanding on the webserver is stopping us from making the switch. In any case, thanks to everyone for the useful information!
June 13th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Nice article, yeah agree to most Magento need more resources than OsCommerce, if you are startup then go with OsCommerce, if you want extensive features and can pay for work then go with Magento as most of Magento extensions are paid and Magento development is costly than Oscommerce. For small startup stores OsCommerce is best.
June 26th, 2009 at 2:58 am
I have been running osCommerce for five years and recently evaluated Magento as its replacement. I like the features of Magento the server resources to run it are too great. I run our current site on a dedicated single processor server and the pages are very quick to load. To get decent performance from Magenta I was told that I would need two quad core processors, 8GB RAM and a RAID 5 drive configuration. Even then it would also need support from Magento to tune the server so that Magento would run with acceptable performance - and the only way to get support is to purchase their Enterprise Edition which is $8,900 per year. Magento is a really cool shopping cart but until performance is improved I’ll continue to use osCommerce.
June 28th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Here is something new then. It’s a free open source ecommerce system that we use it is called PRESTASHOP.
Check it out
July 6th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Same situation as WebDeveloper22, I do not have time to explore Magento as of now, but will definitely keep an eye on it. From the reviews I’ve read so far, it sounds promising.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
TO Brittany. Why oh Why, WHY OH WHY do you insist of windows to host a php mysql solution. In terms of dedication…. what is wrong with VPS I simply do not get it. WAMP stack is a poor poor poor substitute for a LAMP stack. Poor indeed. Please dont say you using IIS i just had lunch…….
July 16th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
I personally think people who insist on using windows for web hosting need not bother… handling webservers in the first place the difference is that dramatic…. having worked intensely with both stacks. Especially when it comes to performance no comparison atall.
July 16th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
I think until you have compared OScommerce and magento on LAMP you shouldn’t bother making a judgement. I suspect that you will find magento wins handily once you have done that.
July 20th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Magento is king regardless of the weighting you have applied. Here’s why.
Magento support is crap, formus have a crap load of un answered questions which keep coming up without answers. Forum activity on OSC is 9, magento should be 4. The majority of Magento forum users have no idea what they’re doing and the ones that do, don’t respond to posts. This is an important point if you are looking at taking on a new system.
Also. support for languages??? 10? Huh. MOST people don’t even consider this with online retail. It would be FANTASTIC to sell to other countries, but the fact is logistically its impossible to do without equally weighted downsides with doing so. SECURITY. Anyone who’s owned an online store knows that dodgy orders come from their own backyard as much as other countries. The thing is t’s easy to verify in your own back yard. Other countries is damn near impossible.
Another thing “Maturity” is a subjective word. OSC to me is an immature system, jam packed full of poorly thought out code. Given magento is “newer” but much more mature in the way it is coded.
I would not say Magento is “bloated” I would say it is very difficult for even an experienced PHP programmer to use. Why? Because the only EXISTING proghramming knowledge you need to know with magento is in regards to PHP classes and XML. Sounds easy you say? The classes are a programming language un to themselves. The documentation for these classes and HOW they work is non existent, if not very very limited. Documentation is available to tell you what the classes are capable of, but not how they work, relationships with other classes etc.
Flexibility is another one which got me. You rated Magento 5 and OSC 8? I would assume you mean flexibility to someone who does not understand Magento? Regardless of this understanding, Im yet to find one thing I can’t do with Magento that I could with OSC. Its all about learning. When I first stared to use PHP it took me 2-3 weeks to get a grip on the basic workings and syntax. It was easy because PHP is well documented. OSCommerce is based on RAW PHP not in depth PHP classes and XML (Magento). The problem with Magento is that it is a relatively new system, and for this reason, documentation on its workings is very limited. Again PHP is easy because help is out there for EVERY problem i have ever come across - and the forums are active and healthy. When I started with Magento, the simplest things took hours and hours and countless forum posts which never got answered. Now, while I won’t go near saying my understanding of Magento is what it is with PHP, I am confident to enough to tackle almost any problem. It just takes time.
To sum up. I would say Magento should not be approached if you are the kind of person who gives up easily. However if you are like me, can’t stand the thought of a true revolution in e-commerce passing you by. GO FOR IT. You can only learn something at worst!. At best you can gain a true understanding of an in demand e-commerce solution which few people can be bothered to master. All i’m seeing now is $$$$$$$$. I don’t care if no one can be bothered to learn or persevere. More $ for me.
BTW I don’t work for, sell or have anything to do with Varien(Magento).
Dan
July 20th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
One more thing. Magento has recently made HUGE performance improvements. Admittedly, it was painfully slow. Not anymore.
Here’s another benefit Magento has over OSC. “Update”. Try doing that with OSC without re-doing EVERYTHING- all your custom work, plus the community contribs, design work etc. In my case this is years worth of work.
On the OSC side. there is a solution called “Oscommerce project” which is made by a few original OSC outcast developers. It seems they have listened, apparently separating OSC program logic from design logic. (I’ve not tried it yet).
Still can’t go past Magentos Update functionality. However the theory exists in “OSC project” to implement this future. Early days though.
Also, it would be nice if someone at OSC project or OSC had any idea about graphic design, form design or user work flow. I feel the main reason people get excited about Magento is because it looks pretty.
Its all about buyer confidence people. Which software would YOUR customers feel more confident buying from? That’s rhetorical.
Dan
September 29th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
OsCommerce has a very limited functionality, and everything necessary to run a proper eCommerce business has to be added to it in the form of a contribution. Although Magento is heavier on the server, it does offer functionality which would take many many hours for a non-developer to install on osCommerce.
To answer Dan’s rhetorical question, I think customers would feel a lot more confident buying from Magento!
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:04 pm
I am in the process of using Magento and have already given up on Os Commerce. OSC is easy to use, but the back end takes ages to upload individual products to and the shop interface is too old fashioned to appeal to modern internet shoppers.
To get better functionality (attractive skins, batch product uploading etc), you need to pay major money to a developer. Magento is more robust, but so far seems riddled with bugs and ease-of-use oversights.
Both programmes have clearly been developed by programmers that don’t regularly buy or sell products online.
Long story short, the masses of time and money you will spend on these programmes is not worth it for any business. Unless you are a commercial webdesigner, you are better off buying a programme off the self and getting selling in days rather than weeks.
October 3rd, 2009 at 7:10 pm
to clarify what is wrong with Magento:
(1) bugs in 1.1.3: images can’t be added to products using the admin interface
(2) product entries cannot be edited (”edit” link doesn’t work) so you need to delete and reenter the product
(3) interface SOOO slow that uploading 120 products takes weeks of staring at a screen
(4) changing the design to something even remotely attractive to customers is expensive (about £200 for a download), risky (I assume that you stand to lose all that hard work) and unguaranteed to work
(5) no live support
…. and its still better than OSC!
Small businesses: you are better off not having ecomms on your website than to waste your time on these programmes!
October 11th, 2009 at 7:20 pm
Been using oscommerce since its early days. Yeah, i agree with most of the complaints here - upgrading is work, its code is a mess of html tables and php. Yes it took alot of work finding then installing the contributions (there’s even wrong instructions in some of the contributions - so they don’t always work out of the box either). But here is the kicker. At the end of the day, do I really care if my site is not 100% perfect? Not really. What matters is Google has spidered my site and ranked it very high. This brings me tons of free traffic and orders every day. So yes I have my complaints, but oscommerce has been very kind to my bottom line. There is no one size fits all in ecommerce. Therefore there is no one size fits all store out there, that is going to be pushbutton ready for you after a 5 minute install. Think of all the little differences each business has. Some dropship, some don’t. Some accept paypal only. You get the idea. No matter which solution you choose, open source is free, but you will need to put the hours in of hard work. Something most of you 20 somethings don’t like, but you better get used to it, if you want to succeed in any kind of online business.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:09 am
[...] eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce Zen Cart [...]
October 26th, 2009 at 7:43 pm
Thanks for the feedback and comments, keep them coming.
My recent experiences still have me evenly split between OSC and Magento, here’s why: I really dislike the way contributions in OSC are integrated with the main code and not separated with plugins, as they are in Magento. After installing a few contributions (many of which are features in the core code of Magento) it’s easy to break the code, especially if you have say 3 contributions applied to the same page, which isn’t unlikely. For all its added complexity at the source, installing plugins for Magento is as easy as downloading & installing to your iPhone from the App Store. It couldn’t be simpler. - More points to Magento
But then last week I had my first client emergency with Magento, late on a Friday afternoon I took a call from a panicked client. “I’ve just lost all my websites”, sure enough my client had followed a simple command on the forum to clear the cash on the server, but failed to appreciate that being logged in as root meant that he’d just wiped his entire /var/ directory containing the files to all his websites, database, the lot. ‘Oh dear’ I hear you gasp. Yes it really was one of those moments where you really, really appreciate backup2L in our case. This consumed my Friday night & most of Saturday. But was back online for the Sunday.
Dan’s points are really valid, no doubt an experienced user and skilful developer, he’s clearly invested a lot of time and I’d like to see some of the shops you’ve setup. But here is the interesting thing from my experience, for all the attractiveness (of the neat admin pannel) and built-in features offered by Magento, it serves to distract from the most important thing; giving an excellent user experience. Some of my customers are so excited about the new advanced features that they are forgetting some of the core basics. The user experience is the true currency of the Internet, only once the content is good, design slick and all the call-to-actions in place, should the administrator ‘play’ with demographically segmented sites, and loyalty points for leaving reviews etc.
Magento opens a whole new world, exploiting this is a full time job (for about 3 people) I feel that Magento would do well if (like with Google Analytics) users were presented with the core features, and then ‘graduated’ to the fuller version. Or at least offer a few setup wizards to get things going.
Ultimately the technology is a means to an end, and for all its added features and glory, I’ve yet to see a customer profit as substantially from Magento as I’ve seen from OS Commerce. Though I’m sure it’s just the matter of the time it takes them to climb the steep learning curve.
November 6th, 2009 at 4:17 pm
[...] eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce [...]
March 30th, 2010 at 7:23 pm
Hi, i must say fantastic website you have, i stumbled across it in Google. Does you get much traffic? If you wishto exchange the links with us please let me know.
May 2nd, 2010 at 8:44 pm
I have been to your site before. The more I take in, the more I keep coming back!
May 5th, 2010 at 2:03 pm
Hi. I just noticed that your blog appears like it has a few format issues at the very bottom of your web page.I’m not positive if everyone is getting this same bugginess when browsing your web site? I am employing a different browser than most people known as Opera, so that is what might be causing it? I just wanted to make sure you know. Thanks for posting some nice postings and I am going to try to come back with a completely different browser to check things out!
May 27th, 2010 at 9:39 pm
Very cool info.keep em coming.
June 23rd, 2010 at 2:41 am
This information is very useful. However, I have some additional ideas about Magento -Facebook to share with you.
You may have already become a member of an open social network like facebook. You also may have owned an online store on these websites. Thus if you find any interest, try using our new product named Facebook Product Directory, which will certainly support a lot for your product advertising?
Actually, Facebook Product Directory is a Magento extension allowing you to easily integrate a copy of your Magento store into Facebook. All the information shown on our application is grabbed from your store in real time including product descriptions, category, price….In addition, we also create a dedicated Facebook application for each store that joins our directory. Then you can buy whatever product you like.
Such a directory possesses two versions: Community version (free) and Enterprise version (a commercial one at the price off $99). Come with a trial version if you’re interested in. And then you merely spends $99 to have one for your own.
You can access follow links:
- Link to an enterprise store:
http://apps.facebook.com/magestore/?action=search&store=magestore
- Link to a community store:
http://apps.facebook.com/magestore/?action=search&store=shopthehetre
- A sample of dedicated Facebook application
http://apps.facebook.com/magestoreproduct
August 4th, 2010 at 12:59 am
Thank you for this great info.
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