Elvis Blogs - Elvis McNeely

I read a post over at http://www.alldrupalthemes.com/blog/magento-coming.html about an ecommerce package that will be converted to Drupal soon. I am glad to hear the news but was a little disturbed by the author who wrote "it's the new open source ecommerce platform that's going to blow ubercart and oscommerce out of the water!". Here is my response to that :p

I have been around commerce packages for years now (since 2000) and never seen any package blow another out of the water? I would say oscommerce probably has the most amount of active users compared to others but the community is slowing dying off.

The Drupal Ubercart team and community is pretty strong. It is my understanding that a company is paying for the Ubercart development - paying three developers a full time salary. Then comes the Drupal and ecommerce (ubercart module) community, both have active forums. Even through Magento is a company (seems so at least) and has employees I seriously doubt they will blow Ubercart out of the water. Maybe in features but even then they will have to hire (Magneto's ad: http://groups.drupal.org/node/3781) some drupal experts to convert their source to Drupal - which the Ubercart team and eCommerce (another commerce module for Drupal) already have a leg up on them.

Another point the author should consider, regardless of how bad oscommerce is (not modular and horrible to theme) many many people use it and will continue to because it is free, ecommerce only (they don't have to learn a CMS), and has many good modules. People are downloading it daily and setting up shop.

Then there are the forked versions of oscommerce; zencart, oscmax, creloaded etc. All are forked versions of oscommerce (open source commerce). If you do a search for "powered by oscommerce" Google gives almost 9 million search results, I wouldn't doubt there are close to 200,000 active oscommerce (including forked versions) sites up on the web - selling and shipping goods daily.

Then again, maybe my post is bais, since I once used oscommerce (for 3 years, as well as zencart and creloaded) and am a Drupal and Ubercart supporter. If Magneto can be be used as a fully functional Drupal module, maybe I will support it too :) I look forward to finding out!