The best CMS for ecommerce

what is the best cms for ecommerce?

I have been on the search for a non-piece-of-crap open source eCommerce package for literally years, and Magento is the most interesting looking one that I have seen so far. I’ve been out of the web design business for a year or two and have not had a chance to actually implement a store with Magento, but it looks like it has the cleanest code, right amount of features and a professional appearance of all the ones I’ve seen.

I’ve tried OSCommerce and Zen-cart on multiple sites, hacking together a site with PayPal and Expression Engine (love EE, just not PayPal), custom coding a site from scratch, 1ShoppingCart.com along with static HTML pages, etc.

OSCommerce and Zen-cart are bloated and coded absolutely horribly. It is an absolute nightmare trying to customize those two packages. There are dozens of features that your site does not need, and they are not easy to take out. The two systems have tried to become everything to everyone and they end up not working well for anyone. Expression Engine is a fantastic CMS, extremely easy to customize with custom entry fields, etc but it’s still a hack to get it to work with PayPal, and then you’re relying on PayPal for all of your transactions and sending your customers to another site to checkout. 1ShoppingCart is basically like PayPal and not a good option either.

Like I said I haven’t had an opportunity to try Magento on a live site yet, but if I were to make another eCommerce site Magento is what I would use or at least do some heavy research on. It seems to have the right mix of features that you can actually use, plus being easy to cutomize and having a slick default design.