I’ve got it down to two ecommerce solutions for my new store, Magento or Interspire - how on earth can I decide?
The recent acquistion of Magento by Ebay does concern me but being open source, there appears to be an solution (plugin) for almost every scenario that I should come across.
Then you have Interspire (bigCommerce) that seem to have everything ‘out of the box’.
It’ll be a UK-based store, selling primarily to the B2C UK market.
Any opinions or experiences would be really helpful.
Interspire is hosted service, where the hosting is with the hosting provider. Whereas, Magento is a pre-installed script, which need to be downloaded to your server.
With Interspire, you need less wory on web designing because it already has website templates for you to choose. It benefits if you lack of designing skills. The downside for the service is this, you are not able to move your software from one server to other server. If you need any technical support, the company is able to offer.
Magento is flexible where you can design your own website. It is transferable from one server to other server. The disadvantage of using Magento is the technical support. You have to update the version to the updated one whenever there is new release. There is sometimes bugs between the older version and the newer version and you have to fix the problem yourselves. In term of technical support, you might need from the web or your friends because Magento does not offer any technical support.
As I can tell you magento is very difficult and expensive to apply design changes and functional changes
I suggest to go for hosted shopping cart
pinkypainter said that “interspire is a hosted service” but not really…
The Interspire Shopping Cart is actually a licensed shopping cart; meaning that you purchase the software, download it, and then install into your own server, so Partyman is comparing apples to apples which is fine.
The Interspire shopping cart hosted version is what is called BigCommerce. Basically the licensed version is a few steps behind BigCommerce because they use the hosted version to iron out any bugs and necessary patches, then they sell it as a licensed version.
The highest price on Interspire is $1,795 one-time payment (at the time of this post), Magento’s Professional Edition is $2,995 / year.
Your call…
Daniel O.
eCommerce Developer
“Research is Key”
and to add to Daniel’s comments
templates are fully editable on interspire.
have been considering moving from x cart to magento, but found that the effort it would take in terms of development to move our store over is too resource intensive. While I do like the “smoothness” of magento, the resources required to use the platform outweigh the possible benefits. As far as interspire is concerned, I have not had much experience with it. What I know is that is is way too overpriced. Whether you take the hosted or self-hosted versions, the cost seems execessive considering other solutions on the market place. That being said, they do offer some support I believe which perhaps is beneficial if you need it.
Magento is too heavy and cost you much more time to keep, though it’s super strong.
Hosted solution is a better choice. I suggest you to use either Miiduu for Feature-rich (check Miiduu Features) or [URL=“https://www.shopify.com/services/signup”]Shopify for simple usage.
Cheers
Take Magento if you are serious regarding your online store. Otherwise, take Interspire.
We’ve been working for a while with Magento and implemented several shops. If you can use Magento “as is” it’s a perfect solution. But when you require different business logic for your products it will be rather hard.
For sure the hosted BigCommerce is a great solution. Honestly, in my opinion hosted solutions are the way to go. Therefore, we recently released our own very flexible solution: 21webmerce.com. Feel free to have a look.
As per your query ,i suggest you to go for magento and the reasons as follows
Solid e-commerce system
increasing features and members base
User friendly -b2c friendly
where as interspire is premium product already got out dated in terms of features and declining number of users
Interspire shopping cart is dead. They still sell it but they won’t be adding any features only the occasional bug fixes. BigCommerce is the product the company is focused on. After seeing how they treated their ISC hosted customers, I’m not sure I would go for BC. But I’m sure their BC only customers have a better opinion of the company. Here would be a better way to compare the products:
MagentoGO vs Bigcommerce
or
Magento vs LemonStand
Just forget about ISC it would be a waste of money to spend on a product that’s going no where.
Ya… thanks for that… I was almost convinced that Magento would be what I had to go with and then you throw LemonStand in there.
Now I have to get thrown back into indecision and evaluate that one too. It looks pretty nice actually…
I’m currently on ISC and I’ll be switching to LemonStand within a year. It’s a very new cart so make sure it has all the features you need. They have a great forum community. The blog is updated often. They have a roadmap so if your feature is missing check there to see if it’s on the list. Probably the top 3 are CS-Cart, LemonStand, Magento.
I second that. Don’t go with any Interspire product unless you don’t care for support and continued development. Somewhere along the line the company changed from a very good company with nicely priced decent scripts, to a kind of ghost company that don’t care for their customers anymore. Their support ended completely somewhere in 2010 after years of steady decline.
I still use Interspire Email Marketer because it still serves me well, although it has flaws and hasn’t seen any update or support in a few years. I stopped using Interspire Shopping Cart and Article Live. They’re just dead and outdated scripts.
Back to shopping software: I don’t know about Interpire’s Big Commerce, but I would stay clear of a company that just without warning and explanation decides to not communicate with a large customer base anymore, and suddenly can stop developing their products without any care for their users.
Back to your question: Magento is complex software if you want to do anything else than the out of the box stuff, and it has heavy hardware reqs. Like Kurtd I would suggest CS-Cart. It’s a powerful program for low costs, that has been around for many years now, and is getting updated frequently. Large community as well. It’s quite a safe bet. For small to midsized shops you could have a look at OpenCart, UberCart, Avactis and PrestaShop.
I prefer magento because it can handle multiple stores, it allows customers to create wishlists and compare products.
I recommend the magento if you are serious about the online web store because of its advanced feature for the designing. Second thing is that it allow the users to handle more then one store at a time and can compare one product with the other.
This is a very old thread and I’m sure the OP has found the answer.
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