Hi Dan, welcome to the EE forums. We were actually in the same boat as you, and used to use open-source products for clients, but then stumbled across EE2 and have been using it since. ANyway to answer your questions:
1. Channel images for galleries, playa/matrix/wygwam for usability enhancements (all made by pixelandtonic.com), plus a whole lot of our own ones we’ve made for various string manipulation etc (will be releasing some more soon). Used to use Solspace User for custom register/edit forms, although thats quite expensive so we made our own, freemember, which will soon have the same functionality. Theres add-ons for nearly anything you need, with more coming out each day
2. Our sites are in the $5000 to $50000 range, usually 10-20k.
3. We used to use wordpress for smaller sites, but hate it after using EE, so now we just charge a bit more to cover the EE licence.
4. We’ve done a lot of e-commerce sites and have built our own module that we believe is the best. Its currently in beta (hence why you haven’t heard about it) and was only launched last week, but you can check it out at exp-resso.com/store. Its usability is second to none, and we’ve successfully process hundreds of thousands of dollars on live sites in it so far. But trying to give a non-biased comparison:
- Brilliant Retail (BR) is a great product but we didn’t agree with the decision not to have products as channel entries (works for a typical store format but hugely limits flexibility), plus their admin section doesn’t really work with the EE control panel so is confusing for the client.
- Cartthrob (CT) is also a great system with a proven track record and a lot of flexibility, but is at the other end of the spectrum. It is completely integrated into EE, with everything stored as channel entries, but doesn’t even come with an order management interface, (you need to buy that as a separate module or template it yourself), and has a huge number of template tags which give a much higher learning curve.
Of course its up to you to make the comparison though - we’re offering the beta version for just $20 so feel free to kick the tyres 😊 I would definitely feel comfortable using either BR or CT, but would much rather use Exp:resso store (and I know I’m biased, but I’d chose Exp:resso Store even if I wasn’t the developer) simply due to the feedback we’ve had so far from clients and other developers. Regardless of what you chose, EE can definitely handle complex e-commerce systems.
Other than that I’d 100% recommend EE, we use it on all our projects now, and would never go back to Wordpress. Hope this helps, let me know if you have any other questions.
Cheers,
Dave