I’m the primary tech guy for an e-commerce site that gets 700k pageviews/mo. and does over $1M/yr. in online revenue. We’ve long outgrown our in-house LAMP e-commerce application and I’m searching for alternatives.
I’ve looked at almost every OSS shopping cart I could get my hands on, but none of them have met our needs. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that we’re going to have to go with a hosted solution (which isn’t all bad, since it offloads a lot of work from me.) However, most of the hosted solutions I’m seeing are designed for the typical small business owner who simply wants to sell widgets from his garage. I need something that is more aimed at a customer who already has qualified technical staff to implement the solution. Our needs include:
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Integration with Google Checkout. Our company president formerly worked on the project while at Google. It’s a no-go if we suggest something else. He’s also a Google Analytics addict therefore that is a requirement as well.
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Powerful API to get data both in and out of the e-commerce platform. This will need to integrate with our CRM application and accounting systems.
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Interface has to be fully customizable. This would primarily be done with CSS, but CMS-liked editing feature for non-technical staff would be a huge bonus. This is what has kept us on our home-grown system for so long.
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If the solution is installed rather than hosted, it will have to run on Linux. We don’t use Windows on the backend and are not likely to consider doing so anytime soon.
What I’ve looked at so far:
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Yahoo Shopping (Sales rep I talked to was iffy about Google Checkout support. Deal breaker)
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Prostores (I’ve learned the hard way not to tie a business to any company associated with Ebay)
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Nexternal (Sample store unimpressive and unacceptably slow)
I ended up going with BigCommerce.