Magento

If your business sells online, your most-basic needs are the abilities to accept payments and to track orders. For that, you need online shopping cart software. There are plenty of hosted services, such as our two Editors' Choice award-winners for shopping cart software, Pinnacle Cart and Shopify. But if you are looking for something you can install on your own server, you should consider Magento (free), an open-source ecommerce platform owned by retail behemoth eBay. This feature-rich service offers you a tremendous amount of flexibility, provided you are willing to put in the extra effort. If you sell via eBay (which owns Magento), the service is definitely worth a look, thanks to its deep integration with the online-auction behemoth.

Keep in mind that Shopify and Pinnacle Cart are hosted services, which means software updates are handled automatically. Magento, like X-Cart, runs on your own server. After installing Magento Community Edition on your website, you are in charge of all the updates, modifications, and maintenance. This gives you the ability to make a one-of-a-kind storefront for free, but it does mean you have to be comfortable with mucking around in the software—or with paying someone who is up to the task.

Pricing Details

Since you control Magento's infrastructure, there are no restrictions such as Pinnacle Cart imposes on the number of products or bandwidth, nor will you have to pay Shopify's transaction fees. You can also set up multiple shopping carts and manage them all from a single interface. This may be useful if you are selling in different types of stores.

One thing to remember about the self-hosted software: you are responsible for purchasing everything you need to set up the Web hosting service, secure the server with an SSL certificate, hook up to a payment gateway, and integrate additional services. This might be more work than you are willing to consider, especially if you aren't comfortable with DIY-style website management. One thing worth noting, however, is that many Web hosting services offer Magento for free in their app marketplaces. If you are using one of those Web hosts (such as SiteGround), you can bypass most of the installation hassles.

For one-on-one support, large retailers can sign up for Enterprise Edition, they'll have to negotiate custom pricing. Magento also offers Small Business Solutions, which connects smaller merchants with third-party partners who can help design the shopping cart, maintain the software, and provide support. There are two options. A Do-It-Yourself partner lets you run Magento Community Edition as a hosted platform starting at $89 a month. Or you can work with a Do-It-For-Me partner who provides initial setup and ongoing maintenance. Prices vary by partner, but some start for as little as $49 a month. 

Setting Up a Magneto Store

If you are using a Web host that already offers Magento, getting started is as simple as going to hosting service's app marketplace and clicking the install button. Otherwise, you have to download the Community Edition from the Magento site, upload it to your website directory, and then step through the installation process. Once you've installed the software, you select a theme from the Magento library and configure the look and feel of the store. Magento has more themes than Shopify out of the box, but Shopify has the edge when it comes to attractive, modern-looking themes. The good thing with Magento is that you can customize those themes any which way you want. Paid themes with Magento generally are much cheaper than those of Shopify, though.

Once the shopping cart is up and running, you enter your product details and information about the payment gateway. Because Magento is owned by eBay, PayPal is already integrated with the platform, which means if you have a merchant account with PayPal, you are ready to go. While Magento doesn't have as many payment gateways integrated from the get-go as other platforms do, you can always set additional ones up with plugins.

If you need more advanced features, Shopify and BigCommerce  let you set up themes, integrate products, create blog posts, and interact with customers almost immediately. Magento, like X-Cart, relies on an extensive collection of third-party plugins—several thousand of them—to extend your shopping cart with additional capabilities. In the long run, you have more options with Magento, but you'll have to work to implement them.

Magento isn't as easy to get up and running as Shopify, but it's not really that difficult to use. You can get a shopping cart more or less ready within minutes, but you should set aside a few hours to get all the back-end systems configured and customized to your needs. If you have an existing store on a different platform, you can export the product database (if the feature exists) and import into Magento. You can also use Magento to push products from your store to eBay's listings and receive order information from eBay for those products. You just need to sign up for an eBay developer account and link it to your existing eBay seller account. When you put the developer account information into Magento, the software will be able to list products on behalf of your eBay seller account.

As with X-Cart, Magento lets you use plugins to add widgets showing the best-selling product, let users submit reviews and ratings, and use SEO tools to configure URLs and add metatags. You can create one-page checkout pages, and set up order tracking. There is a real-time shipping calculator and an option to include customer reviews and ratings. You can integrate with Google Analytics for detailed reports and generate a sitemap.

Support for the Community Edition is limited to an active user forum, wikis, and extensive documentation. Or purchase a support contract from Magento partners for phone and chat support.

If You Don't Mind DIY

Magento has a wealth of features and options, but there is a trade-off. For a great price tag—free—you give up support and the benefits of having a hosted solution. For smaller merchants, I recommend sticking with our Editors' Choice award-winners Shopify and Pinnacle Cart. For merchants who have outgrown Shopify and who don't want to do a lot of management, BigCommerce would be the better bet. In fact, when eBay shut down Magento Go, the hosted version of Magento, earlier this year, it encouraged merchants to migrate to BigCommerce. But if you are an established retailer with time and expertise to dedicate to a customized store, you will find a lot to like with Magento.