General Question

webmasterwilliam's avatar

What software package do you recommend for an online store?

Asked by webmasterwilliam (165points) November 10th, 2008

I am taking over the management of a winery website that is currently being hosted on a shared server. The hosting company (Hostway) has a freebie ecommerce package called Merchant Manager that I don’t like. I talked to technical support (offshore somewhere) and they said that the package wouldn’t support a discount code entry field.

One strategy of the business will be to give people who join the wine club a discount with a personal discount code issued to them. There may be other marketing campaigns where discount codes will be issued.

I am looking for a fair priced, full featured, ecommerce package that I can plug into the website and appreciate any suggestions. It would be great if the package used a MySql database so I could have an program update the database with the discount codes. By the way, I haven’t done ecommerce yet either ;-O Also, we will probably be moving the website to a dedicated server and install the 3 other business sites that the winery owners have.

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6 Answers

funkdaddy's avatar

Magento has been great, has extensive support for discounts and uses a mySQL database. It’s open source so it’s free and has a developing community to help out with questions, support, and extensions.

It’s a little hard on servers so I wouldn’t recommend it on your shared plan but once you move over to the dedicated server you should be fine.

Give it a try, I think you’ll be impressed.

reed's avatar

A nice overview of 13 open source ecommerce applications can be found here.

skord's avatar

I recommend Shopify. It’s customizable with liquid templates and a number of other ways. You also don’t have to worry about compliance and whatnot since they’re doing all that for you. This way you can spend more time focusing on the things that matter.

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