Magento vs. nopCommerce [closed]

Question

This question might be subjective, but I hope you read it thru and help me come to a conclusion.

I am an ASP.NET developer.

I recently got in contact with a big company that sells products and wants to open an online shopping center.

We want to use (at least for a beginning) an open source project. We're considering either nopCommerce or Magento.

Obviously, from a personal perspective, I rather nopCommerce since it's in ASP.NET MVC which is my mother tongue, PHP is totally foreign to me (also I like a layered application, and I think ASP.NET MVC is layered better than PHP, this of course can be just BS, whatever). Anyway, for the sake of the company (that I'm supposed to be the developer), is Magento better than nopCommerce? If yes, is it so much better that it's worth I should learn PHP and develop it.

We could hire a PHP developer to do the job, but I'm a partner in the company, and we do want I should have personal control of the code (the website will also have additional service other than a shopping site).

I'd appreciate any comparisons of nopCommerce and Magento, any links and articles will be welcome.

Answer 1

This is how I would approach this situation:

1. I would get a list of all the features and requirements, then take a look at both Magento and nopCommerce to see how much of these features/requirement are already builtin and how much will need to be customization.

2. Then do some research to see if there are any free/pay extensions that provide the the additional features that is needed.

3. Download and setup a dev environment for both, then try to accomplish one of the simpler customization from your list and see how long it take.

Answer 2

Joomla and nopCommerce are 2 different things. Joomla is a Content Management System (CMS) whereas nopCommerce is an Open Source e-commerce system.

With Joomla, you won't have to learn PHP, unless you want to develop your own extensions which most likely won't be necessary as the JED site contains over 10,000 of them, free and commercial. With Joomla, you could simply use an e-commerce extension such as VirtueMart or HikaShop, both being very popular and having many features. I have never looked into nopCommerce, however using Joomla makes building a website very easy and I would higly recommend for any e-commerce site.