Hi all, I know this will come!!!
Magento Enterprise Edition
[URL]http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition[/URL]
What’s your opinion about this?
[quote name=‘joe’]Hi all, I know this will come!!!
Magento Enterprise Edition
[URL]http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition[/URL]
What’s your opinion about this?[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE]Prices [COLOR=“Red”]starting[/COLOR] at $8,900 USD Annually[/QUOTE]
This is called the “[COLOR=“Red”]Free[/COLOR] Open Source”.
Exactly, you have the Magento’s body for free…
Free for all, but with a “Magento legless cripple and armless and beheaded cart” edition.
If you want the Magento’s legs, arms and head, it’s $8,900 USD Annually!
Compare Editions here.
For example:
Logging of Administrator Actions
[COLOR=“Blue”]+[/COLOR] Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Customer Store Credits
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Content Staging and Merging. Support for both on-demand and scheduled merges and rollbacks of content
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Category View and Purchase permissions per on customer group (limited catalog access)
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]+[/COLOR] Private (Club) Sales including Events, Invitations and Category access permissions
[COLOR=“#0000ff”]=[/COLOR]
Magento: $8,900 USD Annually
CS-Cart: $265 + (only if you want/need upgrade) $49.50 Annually.
Lee Li Pop
Be aware! $8,900 USD it’s STARTING prices!!!
Magento’s prices [COLOR=“Red”]starting[/COLOR] at $8,900 USD Annually 
I can not stop laughing, Magento is really good at Marketing and Joking! I can’t see any value in that $8,900. However, I understand that they’re trying to get more [COLOR=Red]BIG[/COLOR] [COLOR=Red]Guys[/COLOR](Enterprise Level, so the money is a lot to squeeze^_^). So basically, the free version with a lot of bugs and half-done features will make people feel really uncomfortable!!!
So all the current “open source” Magento users have really been beta-testing for this Enterprise version. Stand by as all the users of the “open source” version migrate to CS-Cart.
If I could afford $8,900 a year for a shopping cart I wouldn’t be wasting it on Magento.
Regards,
Graham.
The only reason magento quickly became so popular was because it was introduced as “free” & had alot of nice features, the most enticing of which was the multistore capability. I believe their intentions from day one were to build a very large user base out of the gate, which they did, & then “now” look for various ways to capitalize from these users…uhm, beta testers! I believe there will continue to be more & more of the “this feature is only available in the paid for enterprise version” scenario. I also believe the original “free” version will turn out to be similar to an OSC in time which has become very stagnant with major upgrades like every three years. There of course is absolutely nothing wrong with attempting to make money above & beyond covering your expenses, it was just a rather cunning way on Variens part of going about it as the plans to introduce a paid for version were kept quite under the radar. Fortunately, I had a strong sense that this could happen with magento and decided that I did not want to build our sites on magento & then get railroaded into paying exorbatant fees or having to invest all the time, money & efforts into switching platforms again. (Let’s face it, it is a load of work switching to a different shopping cart system, especially after your current system has some mileage under it’s belt, & rest assured Varien is counting on this fact!) This was one of the major reasons in choosing CS-Cart, I fealt comfortable in knowing what to expect in years to come and as I mentioned previously, IMHO, CS-Cart is the absolute best overall value “bang for the buck” currently available in a shopping cart system! I actually feel sorry for all of the “beta testers” that invested all of there eggs into Magento…
Most of us were taught at a young age to watch out for anything which claims to be “Free” as there is most always a catch, and more times than not, there is!
You can’t bulk upload product with Magento. The module hasn’t worked for a few versions now. That’s just plain ridiculous.
Cs-cart community rocks!!!
I only hope one thing: Can cs-cart change their policy of making commercial mods? It makes developer feel uncomfortable to create something but doesn’t belong to the developer himself.
i’ve worked with magento before, its not too complicated but it’s a failure. Buggy, slow and slightly complicated.
I never sugest magento. I’m new into cs-cart, but I’ve used oscmax (an oscommerce port) for years and it’s very stable and robust.
period.
I have tried magento also, and must say that it is to hard to find a compatible hosting service, also, it is a bitt slow and difficult to learn how to use it.
In fact, I’ve tried almost every cart out there before moving to cs-cart, and this was the only one that I can say that is a good shopping cart for me. Not even Interspire interested me.
Well, I moved from prestashop to cs-cart, so, I’m happy to have a lot less bugs in my shop.
Of cours eit is not perfect, and I’m still having troubles with some database and payment gate errors, but, I must say that this is the best shopping cart of all 12 (or more) that I tried. 
Ok the last post was about a quarter of a year ago. Back in September…
How has things improved since?
Do people still find Magento buggy, resource heavy, inadequate?
Please let me know, I’m torn here…
My programmer mainly works with Magento, he moved from OS Commerce and Zen Cart and mainly sticks with Magento, which is fine and good because it is better than OSC and Zen. Originally I was looking at Magento, but I stumbled across CS-Cart, which looks promising. Both Carts seem great. But the bad reviews about Magento is a bit scary.
The more I read on CS-Cart the more I find it to be quite interesting. But it will cost more for me to request using CS-Cart because of the learning curve, he has never worked with CS-Cart before, therefore will take more time…
Any suggestions please?
Tree.
What about now?
I about a quarter of a year has passed since the last post?
Has anything improved?
both are more than capable carts… the real question is where your level of experience lies, where your commitment to investment lies, and what you want to get back from it…
If you are able to do it your self / have the fund for a developer - bost will provide you with what you need. My personal choice as a developer is CS-Cart - but things can easily change.
As always opinions all over - could anyone who has worked on both carts mention the few top things that one beats the other over as they see it.
Magento has two levels, Enterprise and Community.
The Community one, the one that’s not $8,900, says they’re not going to make it PCI-DSS compliant.
magentocommerce.com/product/compare
The CS-Cart roadmap seems to indicate PCI-DSS is being worked on:
[url]https://www.cs-cart.com/roadmap.html[/url]
[url]https://www.cs-cart.com/pci-compliance.html[/url]
To be blunt, I don’t know whether CS-Cart is going to meet the PCI-DSS requirements by July 2010 or not - but I do know that the only option with Magento is going to cost $8,900. So I’m going with CS-Cart for now to see where it goes on the PCI-DSS path.
CS-Cart, unless you are going really “pro” and have lot of resources (at least 1 full time developer) to study and manage Magento for your clients.
we are more than happy to stay with CS-Cart (after having worked with all major carts in latest 6 year 
stefano
Look at it this way, in modern day ecommerce, “Speed Kills”, only when you have none.
If you visit all of the “Featured Customer Sites” which Magento displays, you will most likely not even find a single one of them which is fast. Then if you consider the fact that alot of these very big name companies do indeed have the financial & technical resources to devote into making their own site faster, what does that tell you?
I can only say that I truly hope that every competitor that we have builds their store on Magento!
PS: Yes, I do have a few months of experience in building & testing of a Magento store.
[quote name=‘huroncomputers’]First of all, excuse me if there are two similar posts - I thought I submitted one, but I don’t see it in the forum
I have a small computer shop - want to offer productas as well as Custom Built configurations. Cs-cart and Magento both seem to offer these capabilities - What features makes CS-Cart worth the extra dollar investment over Magento?[/quote]
To be honest; CS-Cart
well… i fully agree with this unregistered poster: CS-cart lacks lot of needed features for professional biz: from invoices to REST services, from easiness to add product fields to customization of the validation procedures.
to develop new payment gateway or something else deep into the core… you have to really … dig
a part from these… i think CS-Cart is the best PHP low cost but professional ecommerce solution
[quote name=‘Unregistered’]I agree mostly. I am a software engineer. Magento is a far far stronger and capable eCommerce application. It takes a really good server (or host that doesnt overload) to handle a reasonable traffic load. Its capabilities and features are far more robust than CS-Cart.
CS-Cart is a decent small business cart solution. The problem with it is the developers apparently never decided whether to make it complex or easy. It sits inbetween.
Like Magento, they dont sell things online, instead, they sell a shopping cart application. When feature requests are requested they decide whats important or not and often miss the boat.
SunShop is another shopping cart for non-enterprise eCommerce. Its easy to use, easier to “template” and extreme attention was clearly paid to the ability to administrate it. Its “a class act” all be it again, not as robust as Magento or even OSCommerce.
Anyone who actually reads eCommerce reviews or varied industry related magazines/sites will realize there are scant few “PHP” based shopping carts in any “TOP 10 Shopping Carts” and there are reasons for that, including PHP itself.
Sunshop usually makes the lists, again, its a class act albeit not a real robust one.
The others are carts like Mercantec, Shopzone, Shopsite etc. make the lists and have for many years.
Why?
Because they listen to merchants needs and deliver.
CS-Cart could be a “great” cart as far as PHP carts go. BUT… there is a complete lacking in documentation for developers, a complete lacking of documentation even for template designers and lastly the developers want to tell merchants whats important and not. Most merchants will make more revenue than CS Cart does as “Sales go”. That is to say, the consumer electronics vendor makes more revenue than CS-Cart company does annually.
I’ve read things like “Video is not a priority”, really? Thats simply stoooooopid to even say. Video is THE delivery mechanism for top level sales, TV sells ya know? Video sells.
There is no ability to expand base data entry fields. How BASIC is that to do?
In other words, not options, not features… base fields. For example, say I want a “Tagline” field. I should be able to make one, describe the table addition to CS-Cart and viola… Tagline with associated “Smarty” {tagline}.
This is not advanced, PHP forms design applications only been doing it since PHP has existed, and… thats what the pages are… forms.
Instead one need kludge **** such as using the “Short description” field and coding ones own parser based on that field. I’ve had to do this. Site needed taglines and videos. So… short description field now has [tagline][/tagline][video][/video] and atop the smarty templating it parses $product.short_description extracting the information from them and assigning to smarty.
I can make CS-Cart do just about anything I want it to do… But in order to do so it often requires screwing with stuff that really should not have to be done if the application were properly designed.[/QUOTE]
I just ventured out away from Cs-cart to find some other possible options, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything great out there, before starting my newest project.
I wasted $165 on a Magento template before figuring out that the free version pretty much stinks. And being that I have been successful search engine optimizing my previous cs-cart sites, it’s not worth the risk.
I uploaded cs-cart 2.0.12 for my 2 newest projects and it is great!! Big improvement over my previous 1.3.5 sp4 sites.
That’s my honest opinion.
Bryan Robinson
Cs-cart wins unless you plan to host your magento cart on an ultra fast dedicated hosting.
But CS-cart is not without its disadvantages. The sales reporting is still very basic even in the CS-cart 2.0. The invoicing logic has been a nightmare for me and for many others. Everyday I have to do a lot of book keeping with hundreds of failed or open orders and invoices. Nothing has changed in ver 2 even after so many threads devoted to this aspect. Can’t imagine what the developers think when they design upgrades. Or is it just that they are too stubborn to look into this issue.
In fact I don’t see any considerable changes in Cs-cart 2.0 to call it an upgrade.