I've been looking at options for setting up an online shop, and after searching the forums it looks like the main contenders are Magento and Zen Cart.
So far, I've installed Magento and had a quick look at what's involved setting up products, looks like a fairly useful interface.
One thing that's worrying me about Magento is I keep hearing that it's quite slow. I've just bought something off another online store which uses Magento, and the response time is quite off-putting, I could see it costing me customers. It's a small lag each page which is OK at first but gets annoying if you're trying to view a few different products.
Has anyone had good experiences with Magento, speedwise? What kind of hosting am I looking at to get a reasonable performance - if it's going to rule out shared hosting, then I might have to drop it. Or are there any performance tweaks I can look at?
(On the other hand, I know ver little about Zen Cart as yet, just had a quick look yesterday - does that have any similar issues I should worry about?)
So far, I've installed Magento and had a quick look at what's involved setting up products, looks like a fairly useful interface.
One thing that's worrying me about Magento is I keep hearing that it's quite slow. I've just bought something off another online store which uses Magento, and the response time is quite off-putting, I could see it costing me customers. It's a small lag each page which is OK at first but gets annoying if you're trying to view a few different products.
Has anyone had good experiences with Magento, speedwise? What kind of hosting am I looking at to get a reasonable performance - if it's going to rule out shared hosting, then I might have to drop it. Or are there any performance tweaks I can look at?
(On the other hand, I know ver little about Zen Cart as yet, just had a quick look yesterday - does that have any similar issues I should worry about?)