Best open source e-commerce options?

I'm curious what others have tried, abandoned, really find useful - and is there a module that we can use or adapt and improve? Didn't Simon have a catalog module? What other options - OpenCart? Magento? WooCommerce?

And - what about recurring revenue and digital content?

I am now working at https://www.meteor.be and what we do is create e-commerce shops based on Shopware (mostly, we also do shopify, but that's not really relevant for this case as it's PaaS and not open source).

Next to that, I am also on loan to our sister firm PHPro where I manage a fairly large magento2 website.

Both Shopware and Magento2 are monsters : Their codebase is tens of times that of ImpressCMS, and it takes more or less 9-12 months to set up a shop from start to finish with all the customisations that a customer normally requests.

Shopware 6 is the new kid on the block (Shopware 5 still runs a gazillion of sites, but wasn't API-first so it was rewritten from scratch and now SW6 has more or les 25% of the functionalites from its predecessor )

Fun fact : Shopware 5 used Smarty as templating engine.

But even with those gigantic ecosystems, in most cases we go for specialised services like https://www.firmhouse.com to setup subscriptions for recurring revenue.

Most of the large shops that we handle use a PIM, with a very popular one being Akeneo. And anyhow, in most cases we need to do a connection with an ERP that handles product definition, description, pricing, and stock information. That connection is one of the weak spots of any project. Another one is discounts. I couldn't have imagined the creativity of retailers in inventing everytime another complex set of rules for even more discount types. Each with their own exceptions of course. And the cherry on the cake is the payment provider integration. In Europe, Adyen is frequently used, with Mollie also very popular in Belgium-the Netherlands. We've been in dicussion with Adyen for months now because some parts of their Shopware module don't work as expected.

I take it you're not looking at offering a catalog of a few thousand items online, so Magento or Shopware would be overkill. But, I have been thinking of resurrecting the oledrion module based on the knowledge I have gathered until now.

A big weakness in both Magento2 and Shopware, even with hundreds of millions of venture capital behind them : they suck at handling content htat isn't a product or a category description. Shopware has an elasticsearch running, but you can't search for keywords in 'blog' pages. The same with Magento. And several of our clients got the remark from the SEO guys and gals that there simply wasn't enough text on their product pages for Google to index, so their SEO would suffer. So blog content really is important.

So in that respect, ImpressCMS + oledrion would do a much better job

Thanks! I had forgotten about oledrion. I'll have a look at it and see what we can do with it.

You're right - I'm not looking for a catalog of even 50 items, probably more like 10 - 15 at this point. The challenge we face hear in the US is the variety of tax jurisdictions, all based on the point of delivery. That's why I was looking for something that already has tackled that aspect of things.

I think the tax thing is a perfect case to throw at a specialised web service. Not only do you have to develop the functionality, you also need to make sure you stay on top of changing legislation and such. We are seeing the same issues now in Europe, now that governments have seen the big cauldron of tax money hidden in online sales somewhere. Every country in the European Union has VAT tax, but they all apply different percentages for different types of goods.

One thing I noticed last time I was with you in the States (too long ago, we're looking into a new trip with our girls this time in the next few years), is that your shops don't show the final price, tax included. In Europe, the full price must be shown in shops (even online ones) so there are different pricing strategies : either you keep the final price the same, and countries with lower tax in essence pay more for the goods, either you vary prices depending on the rate of the country. But it's a hassle in any case.

yeah, the only thing that shows the final price with all the taxes included is fuel - when you put gas in your car, the price on the pump includes it all.

There are online services that just do tax tracking and updating. Fortunately for us, nothing we have changes taxability based on location, only the amount changes. It isn't difficult for us to do, just trying to reduce the friction of the customer having to wait for someone to do the calculations and get back to them to finalize payments. Not the 1-click checkout people are becoming accustomed to.

Hi @Steve, I was wondering if your payment provider does offer tax calculations? My current knowledge only covers services that are active in Western Europe at the moment, so I don't know about US-based payment or shipping enablers.

Have you had the chance to review oledrion? I know it's old, so probably a refactoring is really necessary, but would it work for you in its current state?

Our current payments processor does tax calculation based on the delivery address. The challenge is creating the shop to match up with the product list and get the transaction completed.

I haven't looked deeply at oledrion, knowing the link from the shop to the payments side is going to be the trick, along with getting tax calculated properly.

After exploring a bit more, I am leaning towards Shopify and creating a shop on a subdomain to preserve all the SEO juice we've built up and to ease the full entry to online shop and pay without our interaction.

We've finished a few more shops at work in recent months, including some Shopify ones. What we learned there was that Shopify is a very capable solution, provided you can adapt your requirements to the way Shopify works. We sadly have had a customer that insisted on using Shopify, but came with loads of requirements for which we needed to force shopify to work in ways it wasn't really designed for. In the end, we got it to work, but it would have cost that particular customer a lot less if he had gone for a Shopware (or magento2) solution because that kind of platforms give you more freedom if you need it.

There was a paypal integration with oledrion at the time, but I don't think it will still work without change.