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Looking for ecommerce help, cont.

pluma

Corporate Services
Business Angel
Jan 5, 2009
75
6
8
Between the responses from other shopping cart threads most people point to magento and oscommerce. There is more than a little concern about magento's complexity expressed in other threads. Now, I'm basically my store's IT dept./bartender with more knowledge in the bar department, but I'm still more comfortable around computers than the rest of our staff. What's the opinion here about the ease of use of Magento considering the primary users here are not at all computer savy?


Couple of random questions:


If I spend more on this whole package what am I really looking to get out of it? Even among the hosts that support Magento, the prices vary quite a bit. What are the more expensive hosts going to offer me besides greater server performance (not to belittle that issue, as that is one of our primary complaints of our current host)?


We are primarily a brick & mortar store that does 20-30% business online. This question may be a little beyond the scope of this discussion, but: How could I connect our in-store POS system to generate real-time (or near real-time as possible) inventory levels for products online? Currently I take an excel spreadsheet generated by the POS, pass that info through 2 (!) other databases, the final of these is uploaded into the site as a data feed. There has to be a better way.


I've asked a lot of questions here, and I appreciate any answers to any of them. Thanks.
 
Open cart is small and paypal friendly (opencart.com)


Presta shop is a bit more powerful (not annoyingly like magneto or anything) And multi merchant friendly, has some other great features as well. (prestashop.com)


Check them out, they are easy to install, pretty much just php & MySQL is all you need.