We've discussed some of the issues merchants have encountered with the ProStores online store product in the past. We had mixed reactions when ProStores Version 9.0 was released earlier this year. Some of this was discussed in a previous blog post.

It was another week of working on accounts with some of the “big names” in the eCommerce and web hosting world. The “size” of the name is almost directly proportional to the level of headache that I get from trying to handle even simple tasks. To clarify, I’m mostly thinking about cases where I am trying to build some type of PHP-based website.

A number of very large companies have helped small businesses and individuals make their start selling online by providing hosted eCommerce solutions (websites with a shopping cart). These include Amazon, Yahoo, ProStores (eBay) and many others.

ProStores, an eBay company, is expecting to release version 9.0 of their eCommerce product on March 19th, 2008. I was pleased to see that among the many enhancements will be a better synchronization between ProStores and eBay in a number of ways. This includes:

I'm one of those who got really excited when I was first stumbled onto the open source software being developed by Magento Commerce. Since that time, I have tried to follow the development of Magento, but alas, I haven't had any first hand experience with using any of the beta versions.

Not that I have a general problem with commercial software, I am happy to see that numerous open source software communities and initiatives continue to thrive. Yes, there exists many die hard fans of open source software, just as there are some who think it is the bane of the software world. I happen to sit somewhere in between - I can appreciate both. And I use both.