templates options, email sender preferences, email domain, customer group, need to confirm, password options, forgot email, password and email sender.
E-Business – Assignment I
Open Source E‐commerce Platforms Magento osCommerce
Author: Hafez Shurrab Semester: Spring 2014 Course code: 4IK202
Contents 1.
Introduction _______________________________________________ 3
2.
Open Source E‐commerce platforms ___________________________ 3 2.1. Magento ______________________________________________ 3 2.2. osCommerce ___________________________________________ 4
3.
Results ___________________________________________________ 4 3.1. Communication Tools ___________________________________ 4 3.2. Management of user data _________________________________ 5 3.3. Usability ______________________________________________ 6 3.4. Adaptation ____________________________________________ 7 3.5. Technical aspects _______________________________________ 7 3.6. eCommerce aspects _____________________________________ 7
4.
Discussion ________________________________________________ 7
5.
Conclusion _______________________________________________ 8
References ____________________________________________________ 9
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1. Introduction The idea of the buying and selling products or services over electronic systems, such as the internet and other computer networks, opens up a lot of opportunities to present new forms of business models and value. This idea is globally termed eCommerce (Chaffey, 2009). Under the pressure of global competition, changing market trends and customer preferences, economy and financial crises, many organizations and companies are losing choice for not integrate eCommerce into their businesses. eCommerce facilitates its adopters to effectively respond to survive and succeed. Generally speaking, Commerce is a trading act between two parties negotiate about the exchange for that act under a set of mutually acceptable conditions, so that both parties show satisfaction for the result. Likewise, eCommerce has the same idea of a typical business, but it is done over a network of computers that can be globally connected as for the internet. Therefore, it can be said that eCommerce is buying and selling goods and services and transferring funds through digital communications (UPU, 2014). However, the e-business environment is constantly changing and companies should pay high attention and respond to that change, which could be controlled by social, legal, economic, political and technological factors (Chaffey, 2009). There are many web-based frameworks used for eCommerce. Some of them is under restrictive copyright and the source code is usually hidden from the users, while the other frameworks have open-source codes. The opensource frameworks could be freely licensed to use, study, change, copy, or it may require charges for the license. FOSS is acronym to free and opensource software (David, 2008). Wide ranges of companies use such frameworks to develop and tailor to be a good fit for their businesses rather than creating or paying for the costly ones. However, the broad set of these frameworks makes it interesting to evaluate them and look through their strengths and weaknesses. This study is conducted to evaluate and review Magento and osCommerce as two of the most widespread free open-source eCommerce frameworks.
2. Open Source E‐commerce platforms 2.1. Magento Magento is one of the most famous open source e-commerce web applications. World Wide Web Technology Surveys (W3Techs) showed, in April 2014, that Magneto was at least used by 1.0% of all websites.[4] It was developed and launched by Varien and some programmers from the open source community under the name Bento on March 31, 2008. In 2010, Magento has been acquired by eBay Inc and it became one division of it. Magento was built using parts of is an open source, object-oriented web
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application framework implemented in PHP 5 called the Zend Framework (Zend, 2013). It uses open schema or the object–attribute–value model to store data where the number of attributes (properties, parameters) can be described vastly (Magento, 2014). It is estimated that Magento’s share stands for around 12.37% of the ecommerce global market (Builtwith, 2014).
2.2. osCommerce osCommerce is a free online software program (under the GNU General Public License) for online store-management and ecommerce activities. It is compatible with any MySQL-based or PHP-based web server (osCommerce, 2014). OsCommerce was first developed by Harald Ponce de Leon on March 12, 2000. Many versions have been released to keep abreast of surrounding evolution, especially in the social networking arena such as tools and plugins (osCommerce, 2014).
3. Results 3.1. Communication Tools 3.1.1. Forum The support forum of Magento has informative discussions about technical details. The search feature facilitates reaching out particular issues. The classification of the main forum sections are technical-based. For instance there is a section for installation problems and another one for programming questions. There are also sections for HTML, XHTML, CSS, Design questions, Magento DataFlow, security, Point of Sale (POS) Integration, and other technical issues. There are even special sections for Magento Mobile and Magento Community where features, suggestions and licensing issues are discussed. There are international forums represent 36 languages. Nevertheless, the responsiveness of the support team was not really good. I did not help me resolving my issue. This is an important point if you are looking at taking on a new system. osCommerce has rather simpler forum interface. The main sections are divided into customers, osCommerce Online Merchant v2.x, osCommerce Online Merchant v3.x, commercial support, development and general issues, which explicitly shows not only the technical support but also the business support. It could be that osCommerce been around a while and, as such, there is a very well established community. I tried to test their responsiveness, and I was really satisfied with that. However, osCommerce does not support mobiles, which limits its functionalities. 3.1.2. Chat Both Magento and osCommerce have effective live chat. It is though easier and simple to reach through osCommerce as it is clearly displayed on the main support page, while it a lot of tutorials and guides are displayed before a one can notice Magento live chat, which could be found through Magento
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Go. At one extreme, that could be a good point for the company itself to minimize the resources needed for the live technical support. At another extreme, customers get annoyed for that lack of simplicity. 3.1.3. Messages Receiving messages from both Magento and osCommerce is up to the users. They can change the setting to match their preferences regarding how often they want to receive messages from Magento and osCommerce and which would be the area of updates. 3.1.4. Announcements For both Magento and osCommerce, news and announcements are located in the first part of their forums, which reflects how important keeping their members communicated is for both frameworks. 3.1.5. Promotion Promoting through Magento is for me slightly better than doing that through osCommerce. The reason is that the customization of how to promote is wellsupported by Magento and that gives it an advantage over osCommerce.
3.2. Management of user data 3.2.1. Tracking There are extensions such as Woopra that can enable advanced analytics on the Magento platform. That analytics real-time profile and timeline for every visitor. The tracking of users ranges from anonymous visitor to unique customer. The steps taken by users could be visible and assisted accordingly with built-in real-time chat. Likewise, there was a contribution of a PHP class to integrate couriers' order tracking systems into osCommerce. The idea is to enable businesses to easily write their own "plugin" courier modules to support their preferred courier. The functionality of that contribution is very high and comprehensive as same as the case for Woopra on Magento platform. It is worth mentioning that neither of platforms include tracking functions as part of the basic platform. The extensions are required. 3.2.2. Statistics Magento has also extensions for sales Statistics such as aheadWorks. It mainly provides sales statistics features displayed on charts such as average order amount, the number of orders, item final price data items, subtotal, tax, discounts, etc. As for os Commerce, there is a free website analytics tool, called AddFreeStat. It provides webmasters with statistics about store traffic such as how many people visit the website, the visitors’ behavior and what they are mostly looking for.
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3.2.3. Identification of online users Magento enables high customization of customers’ accounts configurations. That may include account sharing options, new account and underlying templates options, email sender preferences, email domain, customer group, need to confirm, password options, forgot email, password and email sender templates, and contact options and emails. Such configuration elasticity are also supported by the control panel of osCommerce. The only changes I came across are the difference in how to configure, which was for me the same logic. 3.2.4. Personal user profile There is an extension for Magento enables customers to develop a robust user profile in order to communicate with site admin, review products, and leave comments. The extension supports public and private profiles, as it creates a wall page for profiles on the store website and an inbox section in user accounts for the communication. Profiles can include avatar and personal description. The avatar size, description limit, success and error messages responders and many more settings can be set up by the admin. For osCommerce, LoginRadius’s CMS add-ons enable further customization of the login interface by choosing desired social icon theme, login design, and size.
3.3. Usability 3.3.1. User‐friendliness I can clearly say that Magento is less user-friendly than osCommerce. Magento is rather sluggish and overly complicated to provide flexibility and high customization, which is in my opinion rarely used as they set it up. Developing simple module may require hours and configuration errors mostly result in a whole module being ignored, without guiding hints or messages. Magento is perfect in theory, but troublesome in practice. On the other hand, osCommerce is fairly easy to use considering software tools that enables for the simple creation and management of eCommerce websites. However, customizing osCommerce software requires particular programming knowledge, depth understanding of both PHP and HTML. Therefore, learning curve with this software is much higher than the one for other for-pay management systems. 3.3.2. Assistance Both Magento and osCommerce have rather good assistance features. osCommerce has a long history of interaction with its users and that makes up the biggest assistance asset of osCommerce. The main issues that a one may experience could be found in the forum or actively supported. However, Magento outperforms osCommerce when it comes to the detailed tutorials and step-by-step assistance.
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3.4. Adaptation Both Magento and ocCommerce have high adaptability when comes to customization, personalization and extensibility. The advantage of one on another depends on individual cases.
3.5. Technical aspects 3.5.1. Standards Magento’s scope of coding standards includes Magento Code Demarcation Standard, Magento Coding Standard for Documentation Blocks, and Magento PHP Coding Standards and Practices, while osCommerce’s scope of coding standards is less strict. 3.5.2. System requirements For Magento, the system is compatible with PHP. The system also requires Safe_mode off, memory_limit no less than 256Mb (preferably 512), and MySQL, transactional database support, the InnoDB with any version of MySQL, and SSL certificates. For osCommerce, the web server must support PHP either as a module or allow execution of CGI scripts. For performance reasons FastCGI is recommended over CGI. The minimum MySQL version required is v3.23. It is recommended to use the latest MySQL 4 or MySQL 5 version on the database server.
3.6. eCommerce aspects 3.6.1. Payment system Magento and osCommerce are connected to many major payment gateways as well as alternative payment methods from Google, Amazon and PayPal. Customers can also pay via purchase order, or check/money order and additional payment extensions are available through Magento Connect and Perfect Money® Payment Gateway of osCommerce.
4. Discussion The choice of the free open source eCommerce platform is very crucial since a lot of work follows the decision of using a particular platform. The features and functionalities of a platform should be deeply considered. That for sure includes considering the add-ons and extensions of the platform since the basic version may seem less fancy in terms of functionality, but much more robust in terms of usability and security. Therefore, it would of interest to investigate the community that uses such a platform. The larger the community of a particular platform, the more development potential of its extensions is, or the more scalable it is. Moreover, the industry of the business may impose some constraints and makes it easier to pick the most appropriate platform. For instance, there are very good extensions and addons for Magento for analytics and sales statistics. That may be a must for some industries and will be therefore highly recommended.
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5. Conclusion Magento and osCommerce are two powerful free open source eCommerce platforms. Their functionalities have both pros and cons. The communication tools of Magento could be good fit for technical learning of how to install and use the software and overcome the technical issues. The tools and extensions of Magento facilitates advance management of user data and adaptation. Magento’s eCommerce and payment system are remarkable and out of the box. However, the usability is compromised by its customizability, which makes it tricky to be manipulated for normal applications. Unlike Magento, osCommerce offers packages for experts with high customizability and friendly-using packages for simple business managers. Moreover, osCommerce is rather old, and that heavily contributed to its technical expertise. However, some security vulnerability has been found within osCommerce’s system boundary, and Magento still has much more market share.
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References Builtwith. 2014. Lists of Ecommerce Websites and Internet Retailer Sales Trends | BuiltWith. [online] Available at: https://builtwith.com/ecommerce/ [Accessed: 2 Apr 2014]. Chaffey, D. 2009. E-business and e-commerce management. Harlow, England: FT Prentice Hall. David, S. 2008. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Joseph Feller, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, Karim R. Lakhani (Eds.) Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 570 pages. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 4 (3), pp. 97-99. Magento. 2014. Magento - Knowledge Base - Magento for Developers: Part 7 - Advanced ORM - Entity Attribute Value - eCommerce Software for Growth. [online] Available at: http://www.magentocommerce.com/knowledge-base/entry/magento-for-devpart-7-advanced-orm-entity-attribute-value/ [Accessed: 2 Apr 2014]. osCommerce 2014. Creating Online Stores Worldwide | osCommerce. [online] Available at: http://www.oscommerce.com/ [Accessed: 2 Apr 2014]. UPU, I. 2014. Universal Postal Union About postal security. [online] Available at: http://www.upu.int/en/activities/postal-security/about-postalsecurity.html [Accessed: 2 Apr 2014]. Zend. 2013. Varien and the Magento eCommerce Platform framework. [PDF] http://www.zend.com/topics/Magento-CS.pdf [Accessed: 2 Apr 2014].
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