Alexander Holbreich
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Magento

I’ve tried out some of eCommerce shops, but I forgot about them when i discovered a new kind on the block - Magento.

Why Magento eCommerce looks promising

First of all it seems to be done very professionally, starting from solid architecture but also UI aspects ending with a rich features set. Yes, in my opinion, that describes the most advantages of that shop shortly. Because in comparison to other shop systems it offers very much functionality and flexibility out of the box, combined with a good-looking default template.

I cannot compare of functions of Magento I this article, but I would like to point out some

  • Flexibility of workflows.
  • Self-containment
  • Highly customizable in design
  • Architecture prepared for the future grow on features.

But the best impression you can make by trying it out. I tried it for you and I can point out some disadvantages too.

Magento problems

At the moment the greatest disadvantage of that system seem to be that it’s performance. Maybe it’s architecture. Maybe it’s PHP Zend Framework it’s powered by . Well Magento is really, really slow on normal PHP setup without Zend engine. And it’s don’t comes out with standard 8Mb configuration of your PHP engine, it needs at least 20Mb, otherwise it not works. And of cause you need some not ever usual extensions of your PHP (which is PHP 5.2.0 or newer):

  • PDO/MySQL
  • MySQLi
  • mcrypt
  • mhash
  • simplexml
  • DOM

I called my host provider before a had all the required addons. But I was supported by a good installation routine in this exercise.

Furthermore, Magento unfortunately hasn’t impress with easy installation or intuitive configuration. You can do a lot of mistakes, also one configuration part can affect others, and you will never find out… This is so far bad design.

I think it will mature in the future or be not so relevant at all, because admins will learn how to configure Magento, but customers will/must not learn it. And precisely customers will like your Magento usability, i think1

Magento bugs

Last but not least my version (0.6.13…) of Magneto was pretty buggy. After doing some configuration steps in the admin area the store produces errors (Zend Framework pointed me to SQL Errors) and was no more functional anymore :(. That are of cause teething problems, that are possibly already fixed in the new version.

Finally, I would say, that Magento is the best open source online shop system that I know at the moment, I will stay watching Magento development and will try out newer matured versions. But at the moment Magento is not really ready for productive run, especially the slowness of the system is a greatest disadvantage of Magento for me.

Footnotes

  1. Reviewing this post in 2015 it look very naive… Bad design of configuration, no single point of truth in it, high effort into teaching of personal, too much bugs. Never underestimate that! ↩

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Archived comments (6)

These comments were migrated from Disqus and are no longer accepting replies.

  • Matt

    I also tried many shop and magento seems to have all the requirement that I want.
    I finally made my shop with it and got customers.
    Thanks to the good ranking in Google.

  • TechDivision

    Hi Matt,

    we also think, that Magento is the best open source shop right now - full of useful features, easy to use and very flexbile. Version 1 had some problems with the perfomance, but with the new release 1.1 there is a performance-boost of about 40 percent and Magento is no longer that slow. We´ve developed a Shop with more than 23.000 products and we´ve no performance-problems - not a all. The only thing is that you need a dedicated optimized server (best case: quad-core). But a server should not be the bottleneck starting a webshop.

  • Lesiu

    I've been testing Magento for a while and I must say it's unbelievably slow on standard hosting. I remember version 1.x being much slower than current version (1.1.6), but now it's not good at all. Unfortunately this eCommerce solution needs well configured dedicated server to work. No chance to be satisfied using even very good shared hosting.

  • vluo

    I guess this post was done way before Bigcommerce came to the market. However bigcommerce is based on interspire ultimate edition and this existed at a time of this article. My argument is magento is not the best ecommerce software there is out there. I have implemented for customers before and none of my customers found it easy to use. Comments from my customers were "The software has great features but to hard to remember how to use it". One other problem I found with magento is that it is a very heavy software. It requires High hotsing specs otherwise it will be a complete drag. I Personally recommend the Bigcommerce http://bigcommerce.com/

  • AlexH

    Thank your for replies.
    Meanwhile I'm also not a biggest friend of Magento. Problems of Magento is its complexity in the code and configuration. To many technologies and methods in mix with bad (or no) documentation. To many time waste for maintenance or customization.
    But it's still the best one of the open source shops (IMHO)

  • AlexH

    Yes, it was after.

    <quote>The company was founded in 2009</quote>

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