Is Drupal Ecommerce the best one to go?

Tosho, let me direct your attention to an article at my website and answer your questions briefly.

First, the article: http://www.ubercart.org/drupal-ecommerce

Now, to shed some light on a few things...

"1. Oscommerce was build from the very beginning as a ecommerce platform while ecommerce for Drupal is just an after thought. So Oscommerce is more optimized for ecommerce than Drupal."

osCommerce was built as an e-commerce platform, correct in general. But what that means is it is an entire website system that involves content management (products, pages, info, file, faqs, etc.), handling users (customers, admin), displaying pages, theming, tracking statistics, the whole shebang. And having worked with it for a couple years now, the truth is that it's not good at any of these.

Drupal is a website system that nails most of these things and does it with cleaner code. Core Drupal is more than a CMS, though. It is a base for any web based application that provides greater security, flexibility, and extensibility than rolling your own solution (like osCommerce did) ever will. You can see the details in my article above for more info on that. Ubercart is built on top of Drupal specifically b/c Drupal lays such an awesome foundation on which to build an e-commerce suite.

"2. Drupal is highly modular, which means it executes more codes than Oscommerce."

This is an incorrect assumption. Rather, you should realize that being module means that often less code is being executed. You start with the core, which for Drupal is extremely slim, and add on only the features you need. If you don't enable a module, it's not going to be executed. Ever. osCommerce's code base is nasty. I really mean that. I'm not just speaking as a Drupal fanboy... I am still stuck customizing our osC site until we switch to Ubercart, and the code is redundant, poorly organized, and often duplicated. At its core, it really just doesn't make sense.

"3. At least a few of the top ecommerce sites use Oscommerce (with high level of customisation) which means choosing Oscommerce is the way to go."

Once again an incorrect assumption. Here's why: to achieve even a small amount of customization in osCommerce, you invalidate the installation instructions for every additional customization you want. What I mean is you can't just drag and drop in any old module you want. With Drupal it's simple... upload it, enable it, and use it. With osC you have to upload it, try to make sense of the instructions, and then modify them based on previous contributions you've added. Further, when it comes time to make your own tweaks, you have to leave a trail of spaghetti code behind you to get it to do what you want. The templating system is a mess. The DB is a mess. The code organization is a mess. Customizing osC is simply never the way to go. Don't even bother thinking about upgrading to a future version. That just won't work! With Drupal, you'll find it much cleaner to customize and a lot easier to hook into various parts of the site using the Drupal and Ubercart APIs. The Ubercart forums and contrib directory are full of examples and discussion of how to appropriately customize the cart in a way that won't break Drupal, will keep you sane, and will achieve quicker, more powerful results.

"4. There are many functionalities that Oscommerce can give which Drupal cannot. (I don't know what are these.... maybe some Oscommerce expert can say what Drupal lacks in comparison)"

This is at best a misunderstanding, if not an incorrect assumption. Yes, more people have been using osC for stores, so there exist more contributions. I can also tell you from personal experience that many of these are poorly coded/don't work, some are duplicates, and like I said above, dropping them in is never simple. Further, there is nothing that goes on in an osC site that can't be done in a Drupal site. Your money would be much better spent hiring a developer (there are plenty lurking around our bounties forum) to make the module you need for Ubercart than spending countless dev hours trying to make it work in osC.

"5. If there should be any consideration for migrating an Oscommerce site, Drupal doesn't come first at the list. There are more ecommerce platforms which should be considered and might more capable than Drupal."

Not true. See quaoar's post above. I know his company has made specific migration scripts from osC to Ubercart for large sites. Others in our forums have done the same, and even third party reviews favor Drupal/Ubercart as a solution over osC for redesigns.

"6. Oscommerce is widely used than Drupal. So Oscommerce should be the best one."

This is definitely an incorrect assumption. I don't know anywhere in the world, actually, where market penetration must mean highest quality. If that was the case, why did Geocities die off when most people were using it for personal webpages? : P Or is a Honda Civic a better car than a Corvette because it's more widely driven? I imagine you get my point. osC is more widely used b/c it was the only solution the worked for a while. Then development stalled and it forked to a few other carts. Those get used quite a bit, too. But that doesn't mean it's the best solution, specifically for reasons I quoted above.

I feel like I was goaded into making this write-up for someone's homework project, but that's ok. I'll publish it on our site in the future and consider it time well spent. ; )

The bottom line is you will have a more solid site produced quicker that lasts longer for less money if you run away from whoever recommends osCommerce as your e-commerce solution. I'm not saying Ubercart is perfect, but I'm not alone in saying it's the way to go over osC. Check out this description of a large site moving from osC to Ubercart, the first paragraph in this thread for someone else's opinion, this site that chose Ubercart over osC, another comment from this site designer, and the list goes on. I found these on the first two pages of Googling "site:ubercart.org oscommerce". You can just Google for "oscommerce ubercart" to turn up reviews from other sites, like this review from a web development outfit and this one from CMS Report.

Best of luck whichever way you go!

I'm leading the Ubercart project, so I tried to generalize my words above for Drupal. Anything I said about Drupal itself vs/ osC will go toward the e-commerce project as well. I did try to point to some sources outside of the Uber-world in there. : )