WordPress and Genesis for ecommerce

[Collins]

Can WordPress and Genesis be used for a $500k per year ecommerce site? This particular owner started it in Magento on a shared hosting environment and is thinking of starting over.

[NicktheGeek]

Personally I'd keep Magento for the commerce but with that kind of sales look into a stand alone server or VPS. Then use WordPress for the blog. WordPress is better for the the CMS stuff and Magento is better for ecommerce.

[JohnEniste]

Nick just to pick your brains a little...

With the recent developments in wp ecommerce (most notably woocommerce and possibly marketpress) - how would you rate Magento against these options:
1) In a completely different class
2) Generally better suited to ecommerce
3) Better - but wp ecommerce is catching up

I have never used Magento, and i'd love to hear your first-hand take on things.

ps. Didn't mean to hijack the thread (still relevant to the question asked) and wasn't something i'd start a new thread for :-)

[NicktheGeek]

In this instance I would still keep Magento since that has an established database. Making a lot of changes isn't really something I like to do when things are going well.

On a new site, I weigh the client needs. I have not found a single commerce type plugin that does everything that needs to be done for a full functioning solution, but the major ecommerce plugins can cover most client needs and it is easier for most of them to use a single WordPress based solution than two separate solutions.

I still think there is a long way to go with the available plugins, but they are much better than they were even a couple of years ago. I think a big reason for this is there are more of them now. Just a couple of years ago there were only 2 or 3 semi solid options, and they were buggy at best. Now there are nearly a dozen solutions that are pretty solid and much less buggy.

I expect in a couple of years we will see several stand out options and that will really bridge the gap between plugins and stand alone solutions.

[blancastella]

Magento is in a league of its own. It provides every option you could ever want for eCommerce and there are some fantastic themes for it. There are three big downsides:

1, it has a very steep learning curve if all you're accustomed to is WordPress;
2, non free plugins and themes are expensive (extortionately so);
3, Magento lacks drag and drop for widgets, menus and other layout features that are standard in WordPress. Some themes require code edits to remove cross-sale, upsale and other ad images that are built into them; and,
4, Magento has a very badly designed backend interface. It's very awkward to get to grips with.

On the plus side, Magento works well with SSL.

If you use Magento, read the instructions. There is a good list of Magento guides at http://blog.belvg.com/how-to-start-with-magento.html

Read the instructions for any theme you install into Magento or you will get frustrated.

Magento will work on a good shared server such as those offered by Bluehost and Hostgator until the site gets very popular.

If you need a good WP eCommerce solution, use WP e-Commerce by getshopped. Look in the WordPress plugin repository for extensions to it. You need to pay for authorize.net payment gateway usage and support but the functions offered by the plugin are greater than those offered by other WordPress eCommerce plugins. Next alternative is MarketPress from WPMUDev.

Just my recommendations.

[JohnEniste]

Nick thanks for taking the time to answer. I haven't done a huge amount of ecommerce work and woocommerce has been sufficient for my needs, so i don't know what extra goodies come with magento.

Blancastella thanks too for your input...i would be interested to hear why you didn't include woocommerce in your thoughts (for me at the moment, i think it's the best wp-based solution - although with the new pricing structure it gets very expensive if you need to add several extensions)