So who's the farest of them all???

I'm coming back to MODx after a long break and am excited about all of this new goodness that Revo brought with it.
One question that i'm confused about is what's the best e-commerce plugin as of now. I saw Shopkeeper, Minishop, Simplecart, and VisionCart but all of the duscussions of their relative pros and cons are from at least a year ago.
I also notices that VisionCart is no longer under development.

I'm exploring the options for creating a market place (online mall) with multiple vendors and store fronts. Has anybody done anything similar?

What is the best e-commerce option for Revo right now?

Thanks.

MiniShop2 is very good, and free. The major drawback is that its documentation is mostly in Russian.

SimpleCart is also very good, and not free, but not outrageously expensive either.

As much as I don't care for contexts, I suspect that giving each vendor his own context might be the way to go for something like that.

Quote from: sottwell at Oct 04, 2013, 06:52 PM

MiniShop2 is very good, and free. The major drawback is that its documentation is mostly in Russian.

Hi Susan,

It looks like someone has done some work in this area:
http://garretoverstreet.com/support/developers/cms/modx/revolution/add-ons/minishop2

If this doesn't look up to snuff, I can try my hand at translating the remainder for you.

I'm about to start on some English documentation for Minishop2, just waiting for RTFM access.

Thank you all for the info.
I'll give MiniShop a try.

Dan, I'm also happy to help with translation since i can read Russian (writing is a bit rusty though).
Let me know if you need any help.

Do any of these solutions have support for VAT? How about MiniShop2 for example?

If you're based within the EU and sell to a customer living somewhere in the EU the price needs to include VAT, whereas if you sell to a country outside the EU the sale should be tax free.

@sketchi
I'm not sure about any of MODx ecom modules, i'm yet to try them out. But i've had some experience with PrestaShop and Magento e-commerce platforms and have to say that PrestaShop is head and shoulders better than Magento. It also supports all sorts of taxes, discounts, sale prices, etc. in a very flexible way. One might say almost MODx-like.

@community
I think the perfect solution would be to use Presta for e-commerce and use MODx for CMS.
Does anybody have had any experience integrating these together? For example including product listings in MODx pages, integrating user account, showing shopping cart status on MODx pages, etc. Please share.

Presta has its own CMS (with its own equivalent of "System Events" to hook in to). It might be wiser (and much easier) to just theme it to look like your MODX site and link back and forth rather than trying to do a full integration.

Thanks for the suggestion BobRay.
I have tried to use Presta's CMS but comparing it with MODx is like comparing a scooter with a Lamborgini. They are not even in the same league.
E-commerce is moving towards a tighter integration with content, which needs to be closely managed. Presta CMS is too rudimentary for that.

Here's one of several use cases to illustrate this:
A writer on the content team for a fashion e-commerce site writes an article about the latest trends in women's coats for the upcoming holiday season. Once the article is completed she clicks on "Link products" button on the edit article page. The system brings up a search/filter page/dialog which allows the writer to search for products by many different criteria. She can link products individualy, by category, or by tag words. Once she's done she saves the article and publishes it. A site user can now read the article and see linked products on the same page. There the user can add products to her wish list or shopping cart, she can also see the summary of her shopping cart.

Here's another use case:
On the same fashion site a user clicks on a product to see it's detailed page. In addition to the product's details, options, pricing, and reviews the user also sees a list of articles related to the product including an article's thumbnail, title, and short summary.

Using Presta CMS all of these relationships will have to be established either with static links or PHP code. Neither of these options are suitable for the content writers. Additionally past the first couple of dozen articles the effort of managing this content will be unneccessary complex.

Of course the perfect scenario would be a native MODx e-commerce module. Unfortunately currently there's nothing as mature and powerful as PrestaShop. Hence the thought of integrating the two for their best features.

I've now used the MODX Revo addon MiniShop2 for the first time on a live project, and apart from the lack of documentation in English it actually works pretty well as an e-commerce solution for a client without too many requirements.

Some of MiniShop2's features:

- Cart
- Checkout
- Unlimited products (works in a similar fashion to news items in Articles)
- Each product can by default contain name, description, article no., price, sale price, weight, size, colour
- Additional fields can easily be added by using TVs
- Multiple images for each product, with zoom
- Flagging of products as new, popular and favorite
- Product categories
- One product can be connected to multiple categories
- SEO
- Shipping: by weight or fixed cost
- Payment: Paypal, advance payment, invoice
- E-mail notifications to admin and customer upon new order and updated order status
- Orders are stored in a simple database

For more advanced e-commerce solutions, I mainly use OpenCart, which I believe is pretty similar to PrestaShop. Features that can be found in OpenCart that are lacking in MiniShop2 at the moment are, for example:

- Customer registration/login
- VAT
- Limiting/customising sales, VAT and shipping to certain regions
- Product options with different price
- Payment modules for various payment gateways
- Sales statistics and reports
- Multiple currencies

I agree that in the best of worlds an e-commerce solution with all these features that integrates with MODX Revo would be the ultimate solution. If it's best done by integrating another Open Source solution like OpenCart or PrestaShop or with a MODX addon like MiniShop2 I'm not sure. In many ways it would be nice with something custom built for MODX to make use of all the things we all love about our favorite CMS, and I do like the basics of how MiniShop2 works. So, actually I think my vote would go to the continued development of MiniShop2.