is WordPress good for an e-commerce website?

WordPress will do it, but it may not have all of the features that Magento does.

As you said, it’s all going to come down to how well the flow of both system ssuits the shop owners. Some will like one, some with like the other, and some will hate everything!

Now, for your “specifications”:

-offers good user experience (from the end user perspective – I guess this comes down to the design of the shopping experience)

That’s up to you to design. ??

-doesn’t take lots of effort configure products (you have to think of the shop owner)

In both systems this dpeends completely on the products that you’re going to be selling. Simple products are easy, other products may not be quite so easy. Both systems are about the same really.

-doesn’t require web developer a lot of effort maintaining the site

WordPress. All the way. I do like Magento and all, but it’s a beast and does take a lot of work to get to know properly, so anything based with WordPress will be eaiser for a wider array of developers to work with.

-offers ease of integration with payment gateway (either with Paypal or Paypal Express)

Both systems work with this out of the box.

-offers ease of integration with others such as eBay (not a real requirement)

Magento will integrate with eBay better (as Magento is now an ebay company…) but that ill come down to what extensions are available for each system and the system that you want to integrate it with.

-provides security

Both are pretty good. I don’t think either one is any more of less secure than the other and it mostly depends on what custom programming you get done for it.

-can handle 4000 + products

Magento is normally thought of as being able to handle more products, but I don’t think that’s quite so true in some cases. both will handle 4,00 products, but you might have to look at more powerful hosting options for either system if you have a lot of products.

To be frank, your requirements of e-commerce site are the pretty basic ones, so WordPress is powerful enough for you with the shopping cart plugin like WooCommerce. After all, I think you must be a newbie who set up an online store for the first time, so WordPress is better for you due to the ease of use. Magento is good as well, but when it requires a higher learning curve.

I’ve created several e-commerce sites in Magento and can agree with the comments above. One of the major things you do need to take into consideration with Magento is that it is a beast of a program and needs Magento specific hosting to perform to its best abilities.

The other thing that isn’t touched on here specifically is that you should be more concerned about the server you are going to use as dependent on things like number of concurrent sessions and server security, you can’t just rely on out of the box virtual hosting. Also, you will need to tackle your servers and server providers ability to be PCI/DSS compliant if you are selling anything (regardless of whether you take payment on site or not)

In my experience, Magento handles security slightly more easily out of the box than WordPress. Also due to the number of updates, as already mentioned, plugin compatability can be an issue on WordPress, but Magento doesn’t issue anywhere near as many updates as WordPress. Saying that, within 12 months there will be a significantly different version of Magento coming out (version 2.0)

Finally, the one thing that is in Magento’s favour is that you need a lot fewer ‘add ons’ to create a good looking functional e-commerce site. For 4,000+ products, I would definitely recommend Magento over WordPress, but your server is just as important.

Thank you catacaustic, PHPmatters, and 3Dogsdigital for sharing your thoughts and experience. They are much appreciated !!

This will help me evaluate my choice of platform (and hosting) options when building an e-commerce site.

Regards