This question is not about which open-source product is better in terms of community, administration, hardware requirements, more paid or free modules,etc... It involves a real case of study and a urgent actual decision:
Which e-shop product to choose to create a clothes store?
I will enumerate, in order of importance for this case, and explain the most important requirements (as of client requirements) and the actual point of analysis I am now:
- 1) Product management: In any store is very important how the products are managed. In a clothes store in particular is even more important how configurable products (in terms of size and color) are managed.
Prestashop has "Combinations" of one specific product (with their own price or photos) and an out-of-the-box color swatcher that changes product photo.
Magento has "Configurable product" that is a father of others simple products. No out-of-the-box color swatcher is a drawback and the way it shows different children products price is too much IT oriented (eg: Yellow +20$, totally ugly for clothes) NONE of them allow SPECIAL DISCOUNT (only special price) on an specific combination or children product.
Initial winner: Prestashop by just a little (swatcher and ease to use against complex magento's products)
- 2) Client grouping: Ability to goup clients and apply special prices or abilities to them.
Prestashop has good and easy built-in functions like category discount by group or even category display by group
Magento can make discount by group with "Promotion rules", but they are always low-level and not very intuitive, but very powerful. NO category/CMS restriction by group (only with paid modules)
Initial winner: Prestashop (ease of use and category restriction out-of-the-box)
- 3) Multilingual:
Prestashop has an easy and well integrated way to translate categories, products, installed modules or themes, all in the admin interface just clicking some flag. Very intuitive.
Magento treats multilingual as entire different shops. To add product description or category name in other languages you have to SWITCH SHOP. It allows much more different configuration between different shops, but if you only want MULTILINGUAL, it makes it really harder to maintain. Not that intuitive...
Initial Winner: Prestashop (for ease of use and intuitive)
- 4) CMS Integration: (e.g. with Joomla)
Both shops have some basic CMS module to create static pages or content that you can link to your cms. For real integration more modules (normally paid ones) are made between Magento and Joomla because Magento is in the market for a longer time.
Initial Winner: Magento (better CMS and experience in integration, like paid modules)
- 5) ERP Integration:
Both shops has some kind of web service/API to allow a complex integration with other ERP's/Databases/Application but Magento's ones are better developed and tested (again more experience through the years...). There is a even Java API to Magento WS (Magja)
Initial Winner: Magento (More experience in integration, better web services/API)
These are all initial valorations, maybe I'm wrong in some of the cases. I'd love to hear opinions from Magento or Prestashop experts about these topics. Don't forget we are talking about a specific case: "Clothes shop"
No need to answer every point, just any of them or give another good reason to choose one or another (or even another product). I'll upvote almost anything, and choose the best answer among them.
EDIT: Taking a look at the Prestashop 1.5 Beta 2 (current stable is 1.4.6) it gives more reasons to choose Prestashop over Magento. It includes some of the good Magento features that weren't available in Prestashop (Like custom cart discount rules)
EDIT(2): Strange that there is no answers nor opinions about any of the points. The decision has to be made soon and Prestashop is most likely the chosen one. It will force more work on the CMS/ERP Integration but the other points are a bit more important for the decision.
