What is the best technology/framework to use for an online e-commerce site?

Question

What is the best technology/framework to use for an online e-commerce site?

Answer 1

It depends of course on what language you're most comfortable in and how flushed out you need your e-commerce site to be. Are you willing to go into the source code and muck around if you have to? Are you familiar with the third party libraries the framework uses?

Personally, I've had success using the dashCommerce framework. But I came from an ASP.NET background and have used SubSonic in the past, so the code wasn't too difficult to read. I can imagine a PHP developer looking at it and having a hard time figuring it out.

Answer 2

I would say the best depends on your experience - if you've got experience with PHP, I'd go with PHP. If .NET , then ASP.NET. Rob Conery has a great set of videos on building an e-commerce website using ASP.NET MVC. The source is also published at http://www.codeplex.com/mvcsamples.

Answer 3

Spree is a great solution if you're planning on using the Ruby on Rails platform. While it technically works out of the box as a fully functional store, its designed for easy customization and extension. If you've been frustrated by the limitations of traditional open source offerings, you should give Spree a try.

Answer 4

I am an advocate for PHP because of it's ubiquity and low cost of ownership. There are a number of open source e-commerce solutions for PHP but magento is a great solution, it's easy to install,easy to customize and it's built on Zend Framework so the features that are available with the base framework can be easily available to your site.