Magneto, OScommerce and Zen Cart, the three well known eCommerce applications that allow your users to have online shopping transactions have certain things in common while they differ in some aspects. In order to have a flexible and productive web store, you need to know the difference between these 3 platforms and choose the best among them.
All the 3 platforms use open source code and therefore carry that little risk of getting hacked. Since the source code is available for download, the security is vulnerable. To add to this, none of these applications have built in tools and therefore require add-ons or plug-ins which again carries the risk of maximizing the security loophole.
While the Magneto platform offers title, meta tags and keyword friendly URLs, OScommerce and Zen Cart need add-ons to do the same. However, when it comes to speed and performance, the OScommerce and Zen Cart applications overtake the Magneto platform.
Major differences
The most important difference to be noted between these 3 application platforms is that both OScommerce and Zen Cart use the old legacy style coding and therefore is difficult to customize the shopping cart. In contrast, the Magneto coding is based on PHP. However, the coding used by Magneto is little complicated and is hard to learn.
Even though the Magneto application is filled with rich features, most of them are unwanted for the users and hard to remove. The admin interface in Zen Cart as well as OScommerce is messy. Certain important aspects such as arranging products in order, multiple product images coupons different pricing for each customer groups is not possible in these 2 platforms.
Speed and performance
All these application platforms have limitations when it comes to speed and performance. The Magneto because of its unwanted additional features (which are not even used by users) becomes very slow as it requires higher CPU power. The OScommerce and Zen Cart platforms are comparatively faster but will slow down when the number of products reach the 4 digit mark.
The best thing about these 3 applications is that they are compatible with the well known open source platforms such as Linux, PHP, MySQL and Apache.
Disadvantages
These applications platforms have some disadvantages too and one needs to know them in order to understand the compatibility factor. Magneto’s complex kind of coding and OScommerce or Zen Cart’s legacy style of coding makes it very complex to customize or even maintain the application.
Installing OScommerce add-ons requires some sort of technical know how and is not suitable for a common man. Moreover, these add-ons cannot be used for Zen Cart until and unless are redeveloped. Apart from this, developing shopping cart on Zen Cart and OScommerce application is expensive and also too much time consuming.
This comparison should give better idea about what these applications are capable of delivering. A better choice can help you in easy maintenance of your ecommerce website without spending much over a period of time.