About a year ago a friend asked me why I chose the Ubercart / Drupal combo as the engine for Cool Cavemen’s online shop . He specifically asked me why not choose Magento or osCommerce . I never really took the time to answer him. Let’s fix this.
First, I selected a couple of web eCommerce solution based on the same requirements upon which I choose WordPress some years ago. Namely:
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Open-source free software
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Active project
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Healthy community
I excluded osCommerce right away. I quickly played with it in 2005 and in 2007 for projects that never came to fruition. And I keep a really bad memory of these experiences: both code and templates felt poorly designed and implemented. That’s why osCommerce is classified in my brain as a giant legacy code base, hard to maintain. Maybe the project has evolved a lot since then. I should have looked back at it, but was attracted by another project…
…which was Magento. So yes, I seriously considered to use Magento at some point. It looked great. And clean. But digging deeper I found that something was missing.
My shop was supposed to sell tee-shirts for the band. And a tee-shirt is a product that can have lots of variations:
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different colors (white, black, yellow, …),
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of different sizes (S, M, L, X, XL, …),
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in different shapes (teeshirt, hoodie, sweatshirt, …),
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for different peoples (guy, girl, baby, …).
I wanted to track stocks and prices for each combination. And this degree of complexity is not supported by Magento. To be fair, I remember to have heard of this feature, but was only available in a third party module (that I don’t remember the name). Alas, this module was proprietary. That is the main reason I discarded Magento.
And then I found Ubercart, which allowed me to do exactly what I wanted. Here is
for example prices and stocks for a
black Cool Cavemen tee-shirt (
https://coolcavemen.bandcamp.com/merch/white-tee-shirt-black-logo
):
I use Ubercart since 2008 and I’m really happy with it. The future is interesting, as Ubercart was forked as the Drupal Commerce project a year ago . I’m waiting for the 1.0 release of the latter to decide if it is worth switching to the fork or not. But having it based on Drupal 7 is good news, as Ubertcart still stick to the (old) Drupal 6.
9 archived comments
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Yeah, osCommerce is just a big and ugly script. Think and hope it will die or be improved, but long is its road to be as good as Magento.
To my mind, Magento is really the simpliest, it's fast and easy to set up, and really light. Most of the time, it match my customers needs enough.I have not installed Ubercart yet, but thx for this post. Sure it will be usefull to me if a really specific ecommerce comes with a customer ! Or if I have nothing to do at night ;)
Rgds
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@Tilap: that's great to know I'm not the only one having bad feelings regarding osCommerce code base. But which versions did you worked with ? Is that the latest ?
As for Magento, I'm happy to have you confirm that it's a really good piece of software. Again, I didn't went with it because of what may looks like mundane details. I have no problem thinking that Magento is the ready-to-go solution that will make the majority of online shop owner happy.
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BTW, I forgot another reason why I choose Ubercart: it was its features related to downloads. I found it was easier to sell downloads with Ubercart (think of selling songs as MP3 files). But again, this has probably evolved a lot since 2008 in the world of Open-Source eCommerce solutions...
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Hello. Is there anyway to stop the sales of products whose quantity has gone to zero. Is there a module to remove the product from display or put out of stock for zero quantity products. I am using Drupal 7.x and Ubercart 7.x
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Hi, I ran into this by accident and just wanted to drop a quick comment. That functionality is available as part of the base installation of Magento Community, without the need for an extension. While the catalog setup ends up being a bit involved (I think there are more elegant ways to handle it), using configurable products + associated simple products achieves this feature.
Here is a more detailed explanation of this:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/tutorial-creating-a-configurable-product-
@Nate: thanks for this clarification. I had no doubt today Magento is somewhat capable of doing this out of the box. But read my article again: my conclusions are based on tests I did with Magento in 2008.
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Hi Kev,
I missed that. I just looked at the timestamp of the article and went off that. You were probably wise to stay clear of Magento in 2008 :)
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Actually, good luck to all of those here who use Magento. We have used Magento for the past year, and whilst it has an excellent featureset, it is very tedious to work with, the documentation is terrible, and the free version is buggy.. The problem is, that every upgrade, they make serious changes to every part of the theme (XML, and underlying). In fact, 1.7 was the last straw for us, as there was a bug which prevented checkout. I also noticed that components of Magento were changing which shouldn't have been (the benefit of XML files should be that it offers backwards / forwards compatibility, but every release, they change in ways that breaks your theme).That wouldn't be a problem, if to fix bugs, you had to upgrade sometimes..
Every release, they also constantly introduce serious bugs.. It seems as though every 1.X.0.0 release should have never been released by the testing team. That, and the code is a nightmare to deal with. Magento is only suited for stores with large co
We are actually seriously considering Zencart and OpenCart now. Zencart might seem old school, but a lot more can get done in a shorter amount of time
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Just a problem with Ubercart, there is no way to have Multiple currencies !