Lab Exercise 14

The Smith’s own and operate a small antique business out of their home. Since the company is growing and there are larger requests they want to move into internet shopping. The Smith’s have decided to set up an e-commerce system so people can order any antique they choose from the comfort of their home or work. After searching multiple websites for different software’s that can do this job, they have chosen three they will be comparing. These software’s include: PrestaShop, osCommerce, and Magneto. Since they have been trying to choose which one to go with they have based their ultimate verdict on five decisive factors: Inventory, payment methods, shipping, customer service options, and site search ability.

Every business needs to get paid and needs to get paid well in order to survive today’s economic construction. The Smith’s are making sure they choose a reliable system that can help with their overall duties in owning their own business. PrestaShop presents an application that manages the online business such as inventory, orders, shipping, and customers in real time. It also offers real- time currency exchange rates. PrestaShop has customized product (text and image), wishlist, customer reviews, and unlimited categories and sub-categories options which would allow customers to search all antiques before they actually buy one. OsCommerce has a huge advantage that allows for an unlimited amount of products. This is a good feature to have with antique selling because everyone knows antiques most often come in large quantities. Magneto offers the following services: catalog browsing, product browsing, analytics and reporting that is integrated with Google Analytics, customer reviews, cross-selling, customer tags, compare products, and wishlists. The Smith’s chose PrestaShop as the best in this category because of the text and image option in the search. We all know how important it is to see the actual thing we are buying and in what condition it is in to be considered an “antique”. PrestaShop offers multiple payment options such as PayPal and Google checkout module and also offers special deals such as vouchers and price reductions. OsCommerce provides payment methods through Authorize.net, 2Checkout, ChronoPay, iPayment.de, PayPal, PsiGate, SECPay, TrustCommerce, and other add-on payment systems. Magneto service offers payment by methods of Website Payments Standard and Pro, PayPal, Authorize.net, Google Checkout, electronic checks/money orders, purchase orders, and also allows for arrangements to be made for offline payments. Although most of these were along the same lines, the Smith’s have decided that again PrestaShop was their favorite because most everyone has an account or can freely get an account to PayPal and they loved the option of discounts, because antiques can get expensive. Since all three of the e-commerce users are allowed to set the shipping rates at whatever they feel necessary, the shipping aspect wasn’t a huge deciding factor for the Smith’s. Customer Service options are a huge deal because ultimately it is the buyer who is constantly looking and navigating through the website. The Smith’s decided that they equally like PrestaShop and Magneto because PrestaShop offers a link called “custom favicon” and Magneto offers “Contact us”. They determined both of these elements are important for an e-commerce systems web page. Site search ability almost goes hand-in-hand with customer service. If a customer knows exactly what he/she wants they should be able to find it easily without going through the entire inventory. All sites included a “search” tab, which is excellent but not helpful in the decision making process.

While a decision was becoming necessary for moving forward with their business, the Smith’s ultimately decided to go with the PrestaShop web page because it overall won in comparing and contrasting pros and cons. Although some of the websites offered roughly the same material, PrestaShop seems to be easiest to use, navigate, manage, and make the process from being a home business to becoming a world-wide e-commerce website effortless.