
Ask HN: Build Site vs Use Magento for eCommerce site? - volandovengo
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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minalecs
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.

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volandovengo
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 :).

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ninjastar99
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.

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

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krumjahn
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.

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volandovengo
thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)

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pstinnett
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/>

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volandovengo
thanks for the pointers.

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jokull
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.

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volandovengo
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

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michael_c
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.

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volandovengo
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?

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Travis
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.

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volandovengo
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 :)

