I find e-commerce websites to be fascinating to build, everything matters from branding to ease of use, keeping in mind business goals and users's desires... I just love doing those.
So far, I've been using Opencart to build that kind of websites, it's rather easy to use as a designer, easy to theme for, I didn't try to extend it but it seems to follow the MVC pattern so it must not be too difficult... But, because there is a "but", it's not much of a marketable skill when it comes to getting a job. It looks like nobody is using Opencart so... What are they using ?
According to Wappalyzer, Opencart ranks 9th with only 3th of market share. That's quite low... Top 3 is made of Magento (24%), Prestashop (18%), OsCommerce (10%).
I've tried Magento before and had a hard time wrapping my head around its odd templating system. It clearly wasn't built for designers to use, but well, maybe I should give it a shot again.
From what I've read (both on forums/discussion and respective docs), Prestashop and Opencart are rather similar, main difference is that Prestashop uses Smarty for templates, which is why I prefered OC but hey, maybe I can take a look.
Regarding OsCommerce, I can't be sure, but I suspect most of those websites are old ones that are still running, but that the number of recent OsCommerce website is low. Dropping that one.
So, regarding market share, top 2 of the options I'm considering would be Magento and Prestashop.
Choices have been narrowed down to 2, it's time to take a look at which one of these is the "best" as a marketable skill.
Thanks to indeed.com's job offer analytics tools, it turns out that even though the difference in market share between magento and prestashop is rather small (24% to 18%), the number of job openings are far from close... This image speaks for itself : less than 25k job openings for Prestashop, roughly 300k for Magento.
No need to go further, it's pretty obvious that, if looking for a marketable skill, one should take a look at Magento...
Damn, I was hoping that wouldn't be the case... Oh well, Magento Docs, here I come...