[BoredAtWork]

Not sure if this is the correct place for this question, but hear me out.

I am looking to start online retail business with webstore platform. I am looking at various open source solutions to build this webstore.

Something like Tory Burch | Women's Apparel, Designer Shoes, Handbags, Jewelry & Fashion Accessories (http://www.toryburch.com)

LAMP stack is preferred to save licensing cost.

On the back end, I researched a bit and a few popular combinations of CMS and e-commerce are:

- Joomla 2.5 with Virtuemart 2.0.2
- Drupal 7 with Drupal Commerce
- Drupal 6/7 with Ubercart
- WordPress with WP-Commerce
- Magento with???

Anyone have experience and a recommendation for combo to use?
Any designers or Developers here who have experiences on these? Pros and Cons?

I plan to use one of these combo as back end requirement.
Wont be doing this myself, so I will outsource the work of the design and front end to a design house.

Approx $$$ i should budget?

I have a technical background, (C/C++ dev) in my old days, so feel free to be as technical as you want in response.

Thanks

[SkinnyPupp]

My #1 choice is Prestashop. Although it doesn't have a lot of themes available, the default one can be modified. There are tons of paid addons for it, varying in degrees of usefulness. But overall, it's a great system and has served me well for years. Really good for SEO.

My second choice would be Wordpress with WP-Commerce. You'll have a lot more choices for plugins and themes if you go that way.

Anything but Joomla.. ugh

[BoredAtWork]

Thanks SkinnyPupp, What CMS to go with PrestaShop do you recommend?
As there are more on a site than just the ecommerce portion.

[SkinnyPupp]

I would use Wordpress for a CMS 10 times out of 10

[Hehe]

I personally like Drupal/Drupal-C a lot. Mainly for its community and scalability (to some extend)

But PrestaShop is also nice, and as skinnypupp mentioned, very SEO-friendly.

[trancehead]

*this is one choppy ass post i realized, so ask for more clarification if im not clear as water

I'm no expert but heres what i picked up

i was doing the same sort of research a couple months back and from feedback ive read:
Wordpress and WP-commerce is just horrible for their free service, you pretty much need to pay to get anything workable with it
Same with magneto

So i went with Drupal 7 and commerce
Im no expert with themeing, so ive made a pretty bare bones e-commerce site with not too much work.
there are many modules with commerce that are necessary (such as shipping and all its dependencies, and paypal intergration) which are not included stock. so things like that have to be researched and fiddled with.

For drupal, the biggest thing holding me back from implementing some designs(themeing) is the fact that im not comfortable with Drupal itself yet. There are certain things to modify that are required to get the page to look a certain way. I can do some things, but not even to the stage where i am confident that it is the best way to approach it.

all in all, you need to deal with Drupal core, Drupal Modules (Commerce and non commerce ones) and themeing. I havnt dove into any of the PHP in depth, but i suppose for more complex functionality you need to make some changes which im not even sure how to approach let alone fully explain.

but seeing as you come from a programming background, ive taken C/C++/Java in university so learning PHP isnt too bad since u have a foundation anyways. this will let you do minor tweaking and maybe even the more complex stuff

you may want to look into Javascript and some frameworks (jquery, YUI) as its really important for the web now

[freakshow]

I did some research on this a while back too.. I went with WP/PrestaShop

[BoredAtWork]

Freakshow: did you use WP as CMS and Prestashop as shopping cart? Any trouble with making them look integrated? (sharing a theme)?

[SkinnyPupp]

Also, if you know where to get GOOD themes, please share

[RustedCivic]

Also, if you know where to get GOOD themes, please share

Good business themes:

Chimera Wordpress Themes - Premium Business Themes | Application Themes | Corporate Themes (http://www.chimerathemes.com/)


My FAVORITE WP themes:

Premium WordPress Themes | Elegant Themes (http://www.elegantthemes.com/)

[SkinnyPupp]

I meant Presta themes, sorry