This might be illuminative although I think most guys did not even give it a trialwhy?
I'm looking at magento and it seems like a decent system out of the box.
However, I'm curious as to what plugins people have used and would recommend?
I thought you have to sell your granny just to use Magento.
Very pricy once you get the version of any use!
Could never get Magento to install on 4 different servers I use so gave up on it.
I highly recommend the fooman speedster and fooman analytics to start. The site i'm working on at the moment also has the Magento blog and Realex payments plugins and i've had no problems with either so far
Realex Payments is a must, support by cork based developer "studioforty9". I'd also look at some extensions like easycategory, supermeu, and some of the admin modules like enhanced product grid. All helpful from a customer and admin perspective. The only extension I came across that improves the quick search and make search result more relevant to the customers query is FactFind, you can download it and test it locally to see the improvements, but i think it's a commercial extension for magento.