Transition from Oscommerce to Magento e-Commerce

As we all know online presence of a shop makes a lot of difference in-terms of sale and popularity. There are so many successful companies who have a warehouse in a cheap rental area and still able to sell products on national and international level. They use e-commerce softwares to manage and sell products online.

I work in a digital agency and my job mostly involves developing and maintaining e-commerce websites and solutions. In the beginning of my career there was a very popular e-commerce content management system (cms) widely known as oscommerce.

Oscommerce is an open source solution, so, it has been downloaded millions of times and may be still used by millions of stores for their online presence.

With the popularity and being open source, it has been the target of hackers lately. Huge number of oscommerce powered websites are hacked everyday. We have a fix to stop those hacks which is effective most of the times but still it's difficult to guarantee it.

As the security patch takes time to apply, we were not applying those until clients approved the cost. And, they only approve once their site is hacked and data is lost.

We were sick of hacks and we decided to change the cms. After some research we found new cms which is getting popular day by day and most of the oscommerce sites are being migrated to this. This e-commerce software is called Magento e-Commerce CMS.

Oscommerce was a very easy cms to work with as most of the code used to be in 1 file. Being all the code and template in one file, it was easy to find the file and update whereas with magento you had to look through so many files. There were core files, models, helpers, controllers, designs, layouts etc. making our life hard. I was the first one to start magento in our company and there used to be so little tutorials on the net and there was no one around me I could ask questions. It almost cost my job in the beginning. If I was new staff and was taking that long to update sites, I would have been fired straight away.

It's been so many years now and it's so easy to work with magento now. Even if i get stuck in anything there are 100s of tutorial website that I can check and solve issues. I am proud to involve in one of the most popular retailer website in Australia - binglee.com.au

Since binglee, we have developed so many popular websites with magento and never again look for alternative solution again, as there has been no single hacks reported since magento.

When I add new functionality to core magento i document and post it online on my own blog which you can read here - http://w3tut.org/blog/c/magento

Which e-commerce solution do you use?