I know most people who glance at this blog don’t give two hoots about all this eCommerce stuff.  To those folks, I apologize for wasting your time.

However… I KNOW there are some people reading this who have experience doing this kind of thing, so to you folks I ask: Have any of you used shopify.com?  I stumbled accross it the other day, and so far I’m in like with it.  I didn’t find it earlier because it’s a different kind of solution than I had been searching for.  It’s fully hosted and charges monthly fees+transaction fees.  Nevertheless, I really like how easy and clear everything is.  I’m still looking under the hood to make sure it can do everything wiredchurches.com needs it to do.

One BIG thing it does that I L.O.V.E. is fetchapp.com, which is more or less a plugin for shopify (though it has an API to work with any site) that makes digital download products a breeze!  I’ve emailed briefly with one of the developers, and I’m excited about the potential here.

Well apparently there was/is a lot of confusion in the Magento community regarding “Virtual Products” vs. “Downloadable Products.”  While the roadmap and the buzz seemed to indicate that they were going to be basically the same, more research shows that the developers had to split “Downloadable Products” out of the 1.1 release as it was not yet ready.  “Virtual Products” are simply products that do not require shipping (perhaps an event registration).  The developers say that “Downloadable Products” are high on the list, and should be in the next release.  They may be too late.

I’ve been geekishly excited with anticipation for this day.  Magento 1.1.1 is finally available.  (this means digital downloads are now an option with Magento) I’ve narrowed the field of Open Source eCommerce solutions down to Magento and Ubercart (powered by Drupal).  Either of these look like they will suit our needs, and I’ve had some contact with an Ubercart developer who may be willing to jump on board and help us, but I’m still clinging to Magento’s VERY impressive admin panel.  Oh my.  Decisions, decisions.