I found a citation about my blog in a thread written in Digital Point Forum, whose title is: What shopping cart should I use?
In this thread one of the main topic was Magento vs Zen Cart, OsCommerce, and other Open Source solutions.
I am trying Magento and I like it although Magento is very young, has some bugs and some components need to be more stable and mature.
In my opinion Magento is the first Open Source ecommerce solutions.
Although there are many Open Source plaforms for E-commerce, very powerful and stable, there wasn’t a real Open Source e-commerce solution before Magento.
What is the main characteristics of an e-commerce solution?
An Ecommerce solution has to be capable of reacting to people’s needs and behaviors. This is also called Layered navigation, an expression used by Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail.
Magento has some services and Tools which are approaching to Layered Navigation.
Although a lot of work has to be done, Magento’s Road Map goes into this direction: its internal search engine is one example of this approach. But if you want to see more examples, I really do Advise to watch Magento’s screencasts page from MagentoCommerce.com website
That is the main difference of Magento if compared to other solutions i.e. OsCommerce, Zen Cart, Virtuemart and so on.
In my opinion Zen Cart, OsCommerce, Virtuemart, are excellent platforms for displaying an online catalogue with the possibility of buying goods on line, but they cannot analyze and react to people’s needs and behaviour.
For that reason they are excellents on line catalogues but they are totally uncapables of reacting to customers and prospects needs.
Magento is an important solution because it has born from a marketing perspective instead of a programming/coding perspective.
This fact makes Magento suitable for marketing teams … and in my opinion this is the core of E-Commerce. Magento is full of marketing services and usability tools. Every piece of code of Magento is about marketing and strategy.
Magento is completely merged into Marketing Philosophy: it has many tools up to optimize multiple brands upon multiple stores, it has many tools in order to optimize Adwords campaigns, and so on
Even if Magento has to grow in many aspects, i.e. its SEO services, its Social Shopping tools, in its Corporate blog integration, but it is in E-commerce marketing strategy.
I know that in Zen Cart, OScommerce, Virtuemart, you can put Google Analytics code, Google AdWords, and Google Web Site Optimizer, you can give SEO services, and that platforms are more stable and fastest than Magento.
But it is completely different approach to attach piece of code to services, rather than implementing Internet strategy services.
Magento aims to be a real e-commerce platform rather the others that are more advanced databases. On the opposite Zen Cart, OsCommerce, Virtuemart, are excellent platforms, for selling goods on line but they are not e-commerce site.
An Ecommerce site reacts to people’s needs, an online catalogue shows only products.
