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phpruby-on-railse-commerceshopping-cartcatalog

Recommendation for a Software product catalog framework?

Following is the requirement, in broad terms:

  • An online catalog for Softwares developed by a group of organizations. The initial number of items in the catalog is in low hundreds, but there's a potential for growth - both in the number of organizations & the products
  • The catalog should support the basic features like: product description, screenshots, categories/tags, couple of standard payment gateways, reviews, customer ratings, feedbacks, share to social media networks
  • Programmer-friendly - easy to customize, extend, modify etc; preferably in PHP / Ruby on Rails
  • other 'nice-to-haves': templates, themes

Of course I Googled for such frameworks and came across the following:

Before I actually try them out, I would like to hear the experience/recommendation of others. Have you used any of the above or other similar frameworks? Which one would you recommend for the above requirement, based on cost vs features, considering that those who are setting up the catalog are Small & Medium Enterprises (SME) / independent freelancers? Are you aware of any other framework which suits my requirement better?

Thanks in advance :)

Solution

  • Add BigCommerce.com to that list.

    It integrates with a huge range of 3rd party payment gateways, shipping vendors, accounting software, mailing list sites etc

    We are a web design company and used to use Magento and osCommerce for our clients needs but since trialing BigCommerce out, we are hooked - so much we use it exclusively for any new ecommerce jobs.

    It takes all the headaches out of management as it's already hosted and supported for you and no need to fumble around with addons/plugins that could break your site, as it comes with just about everything you could imagine.

    If you know basic HTML/CSS you can easily get in there and edit any of the 90+ inbuilt templates, but they have a developer network if you need further customisation. Starts at $24.95/mth Definitely worth a look!