Web design & hosting forum: Magento v/s Cre v/s Zencart

My name is Andrew and I have a question I could use help with if you are willing to???

I am curious as I own www.aceleathergoods.com and I am at a very pivotable point having to choose between Zen Cart and Magento to have my site (which desperately needs updating) redone. The decision needs to be made by tomorrow I was just curious about your thoughts on the subject. Aslo important to know that Zen cart bid is at $1000.00 and the Magento bid is at $2500 and thats to get it up and running.

I make my own leather goods and over 100 products but I like the artistic abilities Zen cart seems to have. Most of my sales after 28 years in business are still done at major arts and crafts festivals. I currently have 7500 email customers so...I want to retain an artsy look. Your thoughts?

Andrew blackfiretruck@hotmail.com

I think OS Commerce has way cooler templates but in terms of functionaity, Zencart gets my vote, I haven't tried the others you mentioned though

I agree that magento looked like it had great features but i was unable to set it up in my current host 'readyhosting'. Also, in my attempt to find another host, those too could not handle magento. other than the expensive 'partners' that magento lists as host on their site, can you suggest another 'better' hosting company? i'm trying to find the best value.

Yes magento is really awesome, but a bit tricky to install.

I was able to install it successfully after a lot of tries. Check it out at http://www.123triad.us/store/

You don't need special servers or web hosting, as long as your hosting company can enable PDO and PDO MYSQL, you should be good

Rupesh Narvekar
123Triad

Required PHP extensions for Magento are:
+ PDO_MySQL
+ simplexml
+ mcrypt
+ hash
+ GD
+ DOM
+ iconv
+ SOAP (if Webservices API is to be used)

At 123triad site above, we had everything but PDO MySql,installed, we enabled it and recompiled.

in Addition make sure Safe_mode is off and Memory_limit is set to 32M or more

MySQL should be 4.1.20 or newer and has InnoDB storage engine.

Magento is developed based on PHP so unfortunately Windows based servers cant run them.

Rupesh
123Triad