I'm building an estimate for a potential client. I'll do some more research if I get the project, but need some ideas for now. I'm trying to figure out a good solution that won't take several months to develop but will still provide good flexibility for future enhancements.
My options I believe are:
cms+e-commerce plugin (e.g. drupal+ubercart)
e-commerce platform that is extendable (e.g. magento)
framework+e-commerce platform (e.g. ci+magento)
cms+e-commerce (e.g. wordpress+magento)
The site will be similar to etsy where users can have items that they sell with their own portfolio page. The client wants to add many custom features as well. Also, the site will serve up a lot of images and audio.
I'm concerned that using strictly a e-commerce platform will give me a lot of obstacles to overcome rather than use just a cart+framework. I know Magento is written on Zend, but while I have used Magento, I'm not very familiar with Zend and it seems to take quite a while to learn.
I have never used ubercart,wp e-commerce, or virtuemart, so I'm not sure of the limitations. The products will not need to be configurable. But we will need to store financial information. I'm thinking braintree's vault or authorize.net cim.
I'd like to do the framework+ecommerce platform route. But the client would also like a lower price option, I'm leaning towards drupal+ubercart.
Just would like some opinions from personal experience.
Thanks!
I worked with wordpress and some free open source commerce plug-ins. This was really a pain! I ended up programming my own low scale solution. Later I also worked with ubercart and drupal. The latter was one of my most motivating experiences with drupal. I found that drupal with ubercart can do everything what i and my customer wanted. I strongly recommend drupal...but i've never worked with magento...