Thread

Currently I have site running on Magento 1.4.4 but it required a lot of customization by adding extensions and customizing them which overall made Magento installation a big mess. Actually I have hit a wall where I can’t upgrade extensions because of those customizations, some functionality requests are not possible to achieve within Magento (developers community is pretty weak), etc. After that owner of that store decided to go for something custom.

I have done two custom sites based on CI and EE2 but both are not e-commerce dedicated.

After some initial research I have found that most of them was done using EE2 with addons like Foxee (http://www.hccdevelopment.com/Web-Based-Software/Product/foxee/), BrillaintRetail (http://devot-ee.com/add-ons/brilliantretail), Expresso (https://exp-resso.com/), CartThorb (http://cartthrob.com/), GoCart (http://gocartdv.com/) or just using EE2 and Simple Commerce module.

I’m looking to have extension well documented and easy to customize without any overhead like Magento has.

Any suggestions, pros and cons?

Thanks

Looks like Foxee is dead in the water. They have moved to hosted e-commerce solution instead.

Its seems to me that exp:resso is the big fish at the moment. Browsing the stackexchange for ee, most people are discussing expresso (http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/expresso-store). It seems that support from Cartthrob has been problematic of late, but take a look for yourself (http://expressionengine.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/cartthrob).

But if you don’t want overhead, than obviously Simple Commerce would be the winner there. Depends on the feature set you need and depth of your scope.

I have noticed that for CartThrob is hard to get contact them by email for pre-sales questions/my concerns. Based on what they have on their page (CartThrob vs all the rest) it looks good, but it can ends same way what I have with Magento.

I was thinking about Simple Commerce as a starting point, but maybe I don’t need to invent a wheel when there exists one 😉

I’m looking for a solution which will meet those requirements:

- well documented and easy (flexible) to customize;  easy to add own components; custom tables in DB; product updates/import from external sources
- multiuser types access (is user type in session and accessible via a variable); screen level features, security, and customization
- wishlist with ability to export as PDF (or ability to add that functionality)
- gift registration (adding custom tables to DB)
- product management from SKU level (need to add SKUs first then assign product to it)
- product options with multiple SKUs (that was a nightmare in Magento)
- product image autoresize and edit (similar functionality to Wordpress)
- product availability based on user access type
- everyone can see all products, but not details on all
- various screen level and product details based on user access type

As I mentioned prior I have done projects based on CI + EE2 so I prefer to stick with it instead of jumping into another framework.

Thanks