Having been asked to setup a webshop for a non-profit organisation, an analysis was made of suitable software. This page is a work-in-progress summary I use for myself, but it may be of use to others.
Analysis: sumary and requirements
Having been asked to setup a webshop for a non-profit organisation, an analysis was made of suitable software. This page is a work-in-progress summary I use for myself, but it may be of use to others.
Note: each product reviewed has many features and needs many pages to review in detail (and I don't have the time) - the issues below may seem short and incomplete. These are the issues I noted as I tried out these tools for the requirements listed below.
Summary
Update 16.Jan'09: Decide to go with Prestashop
Status 02.Jan.09: The choice is difficult, evaluation takes much time!
Candidates: prestashop (polished, but limited payments & community?), oscommerce (easy but aging?), Virtuemart (Joomla integration, but difficult for multi-site), Ubercart (because I like drupal, but not ready for D6/i8ln), Magento (nice but not so stable or easy to use). For the moment, I'll concentrate on Prestashop & Magento.
Requirements
- Cheap (initial & recurring costs) and easy to use, maintain, support, adapt.
- Multi language (FR/EN). Webshop Market focus: Swiss Romande & France.
- Multi currency: initially Euro/USD/CHF
- Shipping: pickup+cash, Swiss & french post
- Payment modules: credit card (paypal?), cash on pickup, cheque first (FR), pay after delivery via BV(CH). Accept donations. Minimise charge, no fixed monthly overheads.
- Nice to have:
- could manage several stores (France, Belgium, Switzerland), integrate into joomla, stepped pricing model, management of stock.
- Long term integration with an open source accounting tool (such as OpenERP) would be useful.
- PHP and MySQL or Postgres are preferred (since I know these well).
- Note: Website (as opposed to webshop) focus: French, Spanish, English
Analysis: products
toc_collapse=0;
Introduction
This comparison is admittedly short and adhoc, it would of course have been nices to have side-by side table comparison with the metrics used to compare produces..
There is a Wikipedia article Webshop that introduces the concepts expectations of online stores.
See also the Analysis & Requirements chapter, which is one level higher in this book.
Last Update: 2008
Plus: Tested. Stable. Good documentation, GUI & community. The key contender in a Joomla world. Flexible, multi currency.
Problems:
- Not yet tested: multi-language
- Multi site. Stock management limited
- Less advanced that other tools.
- Very tied to Joomla: difficult to separate from the Website management.
- Minor: No Drupal or OpenERP interfaces.
- "I have customers who type in their bill/ship info and when they click “Continue” to go to the next step in the checkout process, some other customer’s info appears on the order instead of what they had entered"
http://blog.webdistortion.com/2008/05/03/9-kick-ass-open-source-e-commer...
Plus: Tested: Was easy to get running, multi language/currency.
Problems: no joomla integration. No multi-shop or stock management. Stepped pricing model? Theming/CSS.
Not tested: drupal integration (there is a module for Drupal6)
http://drupal.org/project/oscommerce
I'd really like to work with this product as the basic design is very good, but its slow/complicated to get going (it was the most difficult product to test).
Plus:
- tested, feature rich, looks professional, lots of potential. Doc quite good (user Guide)
- Allows multiple sites.
- Orders can be submitted directly on the backend, e.g. for a helpdesk
- 194 Community modules: tried French translation, Swiss Post Shipping
Problems:
- stability
10th Dec'08: after a few days playing with v1.16 an upgrade to v1.1.8 was done and after logging into the admin space I kept being diverted to the main site. A downgrade to v1.1.6 got me out of that. I could not get image upload working. - 2.Jan'08: updated to SVN, read the User guide completely, did several installations.
- Allowed currencies: only euro visible.
- Can upload and view product images but then never get saveed and disappear when I edit the product again.
- The main menu has disappeared in the front end.
- Its unclear how translations of products work.
- Wiki search?
- Must create a customer for each order, cannot be anonymous
- Cannnot save a new order as a draft in the back end.
- support?
- no joomla/drupal integration.
Config issues to follow up
- Home page: Setting up the "home page" is not just point and click, programming needed. How to just have a standard page with categories?
- Swisspost module installed, but being ignored?
- Shipping methods to find: French post by weight
- Interesting modules not yet tested: Datatrans, Spanish/German/Swiss german/ Canadanian frenhc localisation, Bankeinzug/Lastschrift, cash on delivery, Home Link, Bank Prepayment, iphone Theme.
- Commercial modules to try: Store Pickup Shipping Module http://collinsharper.com/web_design/code_modules_software
- Payment modules not yet tested.
Notes & tips
Read the user guide before you start.
Use Firefox not opera browser (Cannot create new customer with opera, fields too small.)
http://www.magentocommerce.com/extension/446/smile-openerp-synchro
http://groups.drupal.org/node/9939
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/9915/P45/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/welcome_to_the_magento_user_s_guide/chapter_4/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/download/get-started
Forum http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewcategory/17/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/
A nice tutorial to try it out is in the book "Using Drupal". A key contender in the Drupal world. However translations and multiple stores are key problems.
- Plus: Completely integrated into Drupal and thus easy to use for Drupal admins. Very flexible many add-ons. New version for D6 on the way. Work flow and products seem well though out. Flexible. Work recommend for a a simplish English speaking Drupal site.
- Problems: if working with Drupal I wish to focus on v6, for which the core ubercart modules are in beta, and extensions and contributed modules rarely migrated. Internationalisation: The French translation, for example, sees to be lagging. Multi currency is as available as a contrib for D5. No multi-shop per site.
- Quick notes for followup
- Shops: http://www.ker-ching.biz/
- Plus: French and thus oriented to French consumers. Was easy to get up and running. Seems stable. The best GUI by far. Digressive stock prices. French/English languages. Lots of features, easy to build pages.
Problems:
- Multiple shops/sites.
- joomla/drupal integration, community size?
- No anonymous accounts, each customer must create an account?
Notes
The following were also found, but not yet examined in detail. We have too much choice!
- Drupal workflow-ng
- xt:commerce: German. Seems powerful. Is this really OpenSource? Seems to be commercial but with sources provided? Finding free downloads or community links on the website is not easy! Downloads are only available with a support contract? 81 euros/year support is not expensive.
http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce - old?
http://www.openfreeway.org/
FWP shop. German system. Looks interesting.
http://www.openedit.org/ Enterprise CMS
ZenCart is a fork of OsCommerce
http://drupal.org/project/zencart
Not changed since Nov.2007 ?
OpenCart
http://www.jadasite.com/
http://www.openacs.org/doc/openacs-overview.html
http://www.oxid-esales.com/en/products/community-edition
Interchange : perl based solution
The focus here is open source, but some interesting offers popped up.
- Shopify: Commercial hosted tool based on ruby. Not open source, but reasonable cheap ($24 to $299 per month plus 2% to 0.5% transaction fee). An easy way to get up and running quickly?
To elements of shopify are opensource http://www.liquidmarkup.org http://www.activemerchant.org
Further reading
A very long list of all kinds of Shop software is in this post
Working with prestashop
toc_collapse=0;
After initially working with tarballs, it turned out easier to work with Subversion: update fixes, see the diffs of new releases with my installed version to judge the impact etc.
The page is used to track progress and issues while implementing Prestashop (PS) at voixlibres.org/shop1 and voixlibres.org/shop2.
Last update: 1.May'09 tests on SVN 801.
Issues
Issues to solve soon
Issues: low priority
Issues: resolved
Improvements
Features missing that would be nice
Modules to try sometime
Security Advisories
Useful links
Upgrading
As I work with Subversion (SVN), the procedure I follow is as follows. As one can see upgrading with SVN release is not trivial, so consider using final releases where possible (even with SVN).
- Set up a development machine and test there first!
- Check out a new copy of the PS trunk.
- Make a list of each file changed in the previous tree (e.g. Tortoise SVN >> Check for modifications)
- For each file modified, copy over to the new tree, but rename the file to be replace with file.orig (actually check all files you change into RCS to allow tracking without affecting SVN)
- For each file modified, do an SVN diff to review changes.
- Copy over non versioned files (e.g. images added)
- Copy over config/settings.inc
- Status 14.2.09:
Version 1.2.0.1: Prod SVN revision 298/9.Jan.09, Dev SVN 463/10.Feb.09 (see SQL upgrade script attached below)
- Read the SVN log of changes since the last upgrade, take note of any major changes such as DB or compatibility issues.
svn log -r 298:463|more
svn diff -r 298:463 CHANGELOG
- Copy over the DB (if on a different machine), lets assume the DB is called vl2, with user prestashop, password PASS:
mysql create database vl2
mysql vl< prod_backup.sql # DB backup
grant all on vl2.* to prestashop identified by 'PASS';
vi config/settings.inc.php
cd /var/www/shop1 # assume we install in this dir
chown -R boran * . # assume we work as "boran", apache runs as group "www-data"
chgrp -R www-data .
chmod -R g+rx * .htaccess
chmod 755 .
chmod -R g+rwx img mails modules themes/prestashop/lang translations upload download
chmod g+w config upload download tools/smarty/compile/ sitemap.xml config/settings.inc.php
chmod -R a+rwx img # don't know why but regenerate would not work otherwise
- Database upgrade: for each of the follows SQL files, the changes will have to be detected, then an SQL upgrade script built (e.g. using Tortoise SVN + diff + highlighting).
- Check for changes to the sql upgrade file:
svn diff -r 298:463 install-dev/sql/upgrade| more
- Then double check that the upgrade file is complete by diff'ing the DB structure, required content and optional content [I found changes in db_settings* for example, that were not reflected in the upgrade file]:
svn diff -r 298:463 db.sql | more
svn diff -r 298:463 db_settings_extends.sql |more
svn diff -r 298:463 db_settings_lite.sql |more
- Tuning that may be needed for the upgraded shop:
# disable friendly URLs on development system, Regenerate thumbnails, maybe change the theme is needed, switch paypal to sandbox mode
Back Office >> Preferences
Back Office >> Preferences >> Image >> Regenerate thumbnails
Back Office >> Preferences >> Apparence >> Teme >> Vl
Back Office >> Payment >> Paypal > Sand box mode
# Maybe change emails alerts:
Back Office >> Modules >> Mail alerts
Back Office >> Employees >> Contacts
Back Office >> Preferences >> Contact >> Shop Email
# Add TEST to the shop name if needed:
Back Office >> Preferences >> Contact >> Shop name