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Competitor analysis

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Miloud Belarbi edited this page Oct 25, 2013 · 3 revisions

This is a collection of notes on Oscar's competition: what they do well and not so well, and why Oscar is better.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_shopping_cart_software

Magento

http://www.magentocommerce.com/

A very popular PHP framework written on top of the Zend Framework. It is available in a free community edition and various paid-for options (Magento-Go, Magento-Enterprise).

Good

  • Large community
  • Lots of partners/resellers offering support

Bad

  • PHP

  • Only seems to support MySQL

  • Docs hard to find and poorly written

  • Doesn't handle large catalogues well. I've been told by Magento partners that catalogue sizes over 5000 are hard to get working in Magento!

  • Lots of people complain that it's slow

  • Some things are hard to customise

  • Admin panel is unintuitive and dated

  • USA-specific: hard to suit other parts of the world

  • Defaults to using MySQL's fulltext search. You need to use the Enterprise edition for to use a grown-up search product like Solr.

  • http://www.boostingecommerce.com/the-cons-of-magento

Hybris

http://www.hybris.com/en/

Very much an "enterprise" platform, Hybris is an expensive, SAP-owned product written in Java.

Good

  • They are good at sales
  • Multi-site, multi-language, multi-currency

Bad

  • Every Hybris instance I've known has been hilariously late and overbudget. And rubbish.

Prestashop

An open-source framework written in PHP.

Good

Bad

  • PHP, MySQL etc

Opencart

Good

  • Easier to set-up than Magento

Bad

Oscar

Here a few things that Oscar does better than most of its competitors:

  • Truly flexible - any part of the codebase can be customised
  • Designer friendly - there are no constraints on the design. Oscar allows you to use your own templates if you like.
  • Modern design built using LESS and Bootstrap.
  • Mobile friendly - the default templates are responsive
  • Works with Postgres (which is better at protecting your data integrity than MySQL)
  • Can work with any leading Django CMS (you're not force to use a particular one)
  • Is just a Django app so you can mix it into existing Django projects, and also make use of the Django extension ecosystem. Celery is a particularly useful packages to use alongside Oscar.
  • Works by default with Solr, ElasticSearch etc
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