What's that old adage, that if it looks too good to be true then it probably is? In most cases I would agree with that but if you are looking to launch an ecommerce or online publishing business then the choice between open source solutions and other proprietary licensed platforms is increasingly becoming a no brainer.

Let me first declare my bias here because we have been users of open source solutions for several years now. So take ecommerce, that's starting an online shop. Pretty much whatever your product the basic functions required for online selling are the same, such as product selection, product descriptors, shopping cart, payment, voucher codes, sales tracking etc. In which case it makes total sense to use a system of templates that have been road tested and optimised many thousands of times - on other people's budgets! Magento's ecommerce solutions is exactly that and has been downloaded over 2 million times and had over $25 billion of sales through it to date. That's no simple bit of bedroom coding. Magento is by no means the only open source ecommerce solution there's others like Opencart, OSCommerce, Prestashop and Digistore. However Magento is probably the rolls royce player. There are loads of plug ins for Magento to kit it out in pretty much any way you please, whether it is tracking your Magento sales directly through an email platform like Mailchimp or simply connecting to a payment gateway like Sagepay. If you are in the market for an online shop I suggest you take a look. We did....