Thread

This is one of the best posts I have ever started.

Yes it was!

This is what makes EE such a great CMS.

Yes it is!

Thanks!

Thanks for your commentc Chris, the only bit I’d take issue is actually a positive for the EE community:

“If you want standard ecommerce, use Magento. It’s a fantastic, full-fledged ecommerce powerhouse, trusted by large enterprise, developed and supported by a well-funded, well-staffed team.”

That’s only really the case if you are dealing with the Pro / Enterprise Licenses, Magento themselves tell you not to use the Community edition in a production environment but thousands choose to ignore them and discover how impossibly bloated it is for most businesses at that level, and discover too late how hellish it is to modify to the needs of their own businesses as they grow.

For the Sub £50k projects we’ve been looking for something simpler, but with the design possibilities that EE gives us, and an ecosystem of add-ons that will help us meet and beat the competition in evolving areas like social and mobile, plus leverage the massive non-product content management that EE provides.

I appreciate your feedback and understand the resource issues, but I’m also confident that between the various efforts the EE community we already have a product that we are more comfortable recommending to a certain tier of clients ahead of Magento Community on the basis of a far better ROI on their first few years investment, and that’s pretty impressive.

By the way, Rob and I have been gearing up for a new blast of refinements and feature additions (FINALLY finished off some multi-year long client projects… *sigh*....). If it’s alright, I’ll call you about some questions I have.

I’ll call you about some questions I have.

Who do you need to call? If it’s me (not being vain, just that mine was the previous post) drop me a note at info at shinemarketing dot com, glad to help.

Will do.

I’ve been complaining about EE not having a real commerce engine for YEARS - since 2007 😊!

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/89995/
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/62907/
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/69765/
http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/56092/

Thank you guys for your hard work. I bought CT as soon as I saw it not because I had an immediate project, but just because I wanted to support the effort.

Thanks CT, BR, Membrr, payEE, and any other commerce solution i missed for providing us with REAL options that we didn’t have before.

Thank you! Thank YOU! THANK YOU!!

+1 😊

Thank you all for the time you spent describing both BR and CT.
This information is invaluable and helps us all with making decisions in regards to choosing the right plugin for the right project.

Another thanks to everyone who has contributed to this most informative thread on e-commerce options. I’ve not only found out how Carthrob and Brilliant Retail compare, which was my initial goal, but I’ve learnt about what I need to be thinking about regarding e-commerce in general.

I’ve just had my most promising invitation to work on an ecommerce project since starting my own business (from an existing client who is extremely happy with our work so far) and reading this thread has helped boost my confidence that we will be able to find a good solution with ExpressionEngine.  The shop would be unusual in that it has a very limited number of products, and they are a high end fashion brand who’s clothes are sold based on how they look as part of an outfit and due to the quality of the fabric and cut of the clothes. This means we won’t want to have the typical shop navigation of products > tops and Products > trousers, and the user experience will need to be very slick and un-shop like.

hearing Brendan say

I can design the experience first, and know that it can work the way that I want it to work.

is exactly what I want to hear!

Many thanks, great discusion. Finally i know what cart system suitable for my project 😊

If I may bump this… I’ve got a client that has fairly standard eCommerce needs, with one possible exception: they’re running multiple sites via MSM, and each site may or may not need different products/settings/etc. In such a case, does one solution stand out as a more logical choice than the other?

tl;dr: What does MSM support look like for both CT and BR?

Rob at CT said (on their forum): When we say we support MSM, we mean that we support running multiple stores (one per MSM site), not running a store based on the entries from one site (cross site).

Amazing Thread… and Really Helpful…!!!

Thanks guys… 😊

I have just tried the new Brilliant Retail with EE 2.4.0 and the ability to add custom fields seems broken? I added an attribute and then added that to a group. Went to add a new product and can’t add that custom attribute. Nothing happens. This would seem to be easier in a normal channel configuration. I am going to uninstall it and go back to Carthrob as I also need deep channel integration with content. For example I want to search a group of phones and find all the product content and related articles. Brilliant Retail does not look like I can do that easily.
If you just needed a cart then I’m sure it’s…well…Brilliant. I need lots of custom fields and a quick way of doing them. I’m not really into the attributes thing as that seems like a broken model for what I am trying to do. I also need the deep integration with content, and that seems a more likely scenario in EE.
Happy to get any feedback on this and a pity as I spent the $150 bucks.

This thread was Full of nice information. I got a lot of new information from this thread especially about the Brilliant Retail used in EE 2.1.3 project.Thanks for Sharing the perfect information.