Recommendation: Magento Commerce is a powerful shopping cart, but it comes at a steep price. First, if you are going to process credit cards in your store, you will need the Professional or Enterprise edition to obtain PA-DSS compliance. In addition, the smallest VPS server I would use for Magento is 2GB, which runs $265 per month. Also, customizing Magento is more expensive than any other system. You must keep these extra expenses in mind if you plan to expand your store and upgrade to Professional or Enterprise in the future. We currently host clients who are running the free Magento Community edition on a 2GB server combined with a gateway-served payment page, such as Authorize.net SIM, to avoid PA-DSS complications. It works well for them so far but there is always a risk of a major software failure and there is no developers support included with a Community edition.

Recommendation: We have many stores successfully running Pinnacle Cart, but that system does not have many of the standard features included with X-cart or Magento; design selection is limited; no third party add-ons and customizing is expensive. On the other hand, this is the easiest system to upgrade, and the software company releases new versions regularly, so it may be a valid choice if you are looking for upgradability and do not require fancy functions.

Recommendation: Interspire is a good looking system, but we have experienced very poor support from its developers lately and fixing the bugs takes forever. No PA-DSS certification  at the time of this article. Another downside is that there are no third party add-ons and customizations are expensive. Interspire makes up for those shortcomings with the best selection of the included designs and easy-to-use interface.