Magento Pros And Cons
- Category: questions, web design, web development
We think Magento is one of the best Ecommerce platforms out there. Since the question of Magento’s pros and cons comes back over and over, I decided to list the major advantages and disadvantages of using Magento versus other Ecommerce platforms.
Top 3 Magento Pros:
1. Magento is open source. Magento is built on the powerful Zend Framework and the platform uses open source technologies and programming languages. That means a lot of things but for the store owner that means the flexibility of modifying or expanding the platform any way you’d like – as long as you have a good Magento expert team to work with.
2. Magento has a large community of users, developers, and service providers worldwide. And that community is growing. The platform is evolving all the time and there are countless Magento Templates, extensions, modules, and widgets available out there, both commercial and free.
3. Magento is a feature rich Ecommerce platform that has built in pretty much all the features you’d expect from a top of the line Ecommerce website, including advanced promotion and marketing tools. Magento also comes with easy integration with great 3rd party services such as Google Analytics, Google Base, Google Checkout, Google Website Optimizer, a variety of payment processing services (including Paypal Express, Paypal Standard, and Paypal Website Payments Pro), and much more!
Top 3 Magento Cons:
1. Magento is a complex, intricate platform built on top of the Zend Framework. And it’s big! It is programmed based on the MVC approach, and follows best web programming practices. For these reasons and others, Magento is a system that is not easy to work with. What I mean by that is that if you want to customize Magento properly, any request will take a good developer much longer than if you were to work with most other open source platforms. That means that you’d have to have an appropriate budget if you are looking to work with Magento, or else you’ll end up with a job poorly done. And Magento is not forgiving! If you don’t do things right, you’ll end up with more trouble, headache, issues, and overall more time and money down the road!
2. Good Magento developers are rare! It is one thing to be able to play around Magento – it’s another to know the system well and be able to customize it and program on top of it. Good Magento developers are very rare, and it’s even more unlikely that you’ll find a team that includes good Magento developers, and good Magento designers! Remember that design, client side programming, and server side programming are 3 areas of the web design field that require a completely different set of skills. And it’s hard to find them all under one roof – especially when it comes to Magento.
3. Magento requires a very good hosting environment and store management. Many people complain about Magento’s speed performance – but that’s only because they aren’t working with the proper hosting environment and setup. Unlike simpler systems, such as WordPress for example which will work great pretty much anywhere, Magento will perform very poorly if the website is not properly hosted and setup. What’s that mean? You’ll have to pay for a good server, and for a good team to setup your server and manage it.
Hope this was helpful! Any questions? Don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments below!
Trust me, any developer who has worked with Magento will show you their battle scars
Noam - April 19th, 2010
For examples, you can use one of the stunning Magento templates at Magentist.com. Setup Magento, install the template, and start adding your products. Down the road you’ll gain a lot from using Magento and wide range of features and possibilities that it brings. Just don’t try to customize too much or try to manipulate it to do something significantly different than what it does by default because for that you’d need a good Magento developer… and those are very rare and usually pretty busy.
I can tell you more about what you’ll gain by using Magento depending on the specifics of your project but I recommend Magento for pretty much any Ecommerce project, regardless of the number of products. If you get a template and are someone who can find his way around you don’t need any coding knowledge to end up with an amazing store.
I hope this helps!
You should try Lightspeed module. You can see a demo of it at lightspeed-demo.delorumcommerce.com. This site runs on a server with only 1gb of ram 10gb of hard drive and is on a virtual server. With Lightspeed installed we see page load times from .5 to 1 second.
Lightspeed at store.delorumcommerce.com
For some of the tweaks I had to touch on the core files and some of the changes really drives me crazy. I am php web developer from 10+ years and trust me, this is the first PHP software which makes me wonder “am I stupid, or the code is so schizophrenic complicated”.
Support is 0 – in the community forums you can wait for ages if someone answer to your questions and most of the time it’s an user who experienced the same problem asking for solution too.
Upgrade of the platform is nightmare, that’s why we are on 1.2.xxx while the current version is 1.5.
So currently I am looking for Magento alternative…
Noam - January 16th, 2011
Ultimento is the fastest loading Magento theme on the planet. Ultimento also includes over 10 premium Magento extensions and entirely revamps the platform for SEO and conversions while being 100% upgrade proof. Not to mention the 1-click auto-installer, multiple color schemes, CMS templates, etc. Worth looking into no? ultimento.com
Thanks!
Noam.