Magento
July 26, 2009 by: admin
Magento Commerce is an open source eCommerce shopping cart platform brought to you by a company called Verian. The shopping cart is quite feature rich out of the box, and is positioned to be the de-facto standard for open source eCommerce platforms.
Pricing: $0 – $8,900/year
Magento Commerce comes in 2 flavors: The Community Edition which is available as a free open source download, and the feature rich Enterprise Edition which costs $8,900 a year.
Latest Version: 1.3.2.3
For further reading:
- Magento Commerce – A First Look
- Magento eCommerce Review: Platform Perils and Impressions, Three Months In
- The PeC Review: Magento is the Open Source Powerhouse
- 25 Magneto templates for your ecommerce business
Contact Magento:
http://www.magentocommerce.com/
11832 W. Pico Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90064
Enterprise Sales
+1 (310) 594-7638 (N. America)
+44 20 3286 4137 (UK)
Save yourselves the trouble. Find something else. Magento is promising, but lacks in some very basic features — features you’d expect. Sales reports by products, for example. Would you believe you can’t generate a report of how many sales you’ve had for Product X? Believe it. It’s true.
I see Magento more as a starting point or a framework for a company that does e-commerce and has professional developers.
It is hard to compare it with something like Joomla or osCommerce. It’s just not click and you’re ready on a $5 dollar hosting. But if you have a group of developers to make a web shop for a big and important customer, Magento is just ideal choice.
Excellent platform and highly recomended. It’s clear most of the people commenting here are completely out of their league and quite clueless.
One of the best eCommerce platforms on the market and best of all its open source and free.
I’ve recently launched a Magento powered store at http://www.carbonfibergear.com
I’m currently going through the process of doing a complete design overhaul as I just launched my new design on the main blog site. Regardless, I’ve been able to use Magento now for about a month or so, and I’m thoroughly impressed with its features. No shopping cart is perfect, as I’ve found…none of them do EXACTLY what I wanted, but this came the closest, and it was free. I wasn’t about to pay Shopify $24-$299/month PLUS transaction fees. The transaction fee is what really kills it for me. Aside from credit cards, you can sure as hell bet I don’t want to even give .5% of all of my gross sales (including shipping) just to have a hosted eCommerce system.
While the learning curve with Magento was STEEP, once I figured the majority of things out, it’s fairly intuitive…and there’s reasons for setting up the templating/architecture the way they do. There have been a few gripes I’ve had, but mostly I’ve had a good experience. The gripes I’ve had I’m able to overcome for now, and I hope that they fix in upcoming releases. For software that is free, it’s awesome. I use osCommerce on an old eCommerce site I’ve had for a while, and Magento hands down puts it to shame.
Also – as other people mentioned, it’s fairly server intensive, but the latest versions seems to be 10 fold better than before. It looks like they’re working on improving performance. I had been following development since the way beginning (before it was released), and there were many times where I had played around with it, and decided against it for mainly performance reasons. Now that I’m live with the latest version, it’s not bad at all. Also, installation can come with its issues, it’s very picky about what it requires to work…so that is definitely another pain to overcome (for example it took me forever when testing locally to realize you can’t use localhost, you must use 127.0.0.1 or else you’ll never get in the admin.
Documentation on their side is starting to get somewhat outdated, and I’m looking forward to them updating what they can. Hope this is all useful to anybody considering it, or that has used it in the past but hasn’t given it another try.
I know that there aren’t a lot of templates out there, which is part of the problem…but hopefully more awareness on the product like this, will also help drive it to be a better and better product over time.
I have been evaluating quite a few e-commerce solutions these past months and I can only say that Magento outperforms all other I have tested so far.
Those saying it is hard to install… huh? It’s not different from all the others, click, click and you are ready to go. Buggy? Not what I have experienced yet and it runs well on a “standard” hosting solution.
No, I think it is a really good platform. The next platform I’m about to test is Prestashop so we’ll see how those two compares.
WORST SHOPPING CART EVER… It’s a web designer’s nightmare. This cart DOES NOT WORK OUT OF THE BOX. You need to code the content right into the php files too, so your clients can’t manage their website from the backend. AWEFUL. And takes 10 years to design the frontend, which ends up being extremely buggy. I lost money on a project using Magento and had to go purchase X-cart (which I highly recommend if you want to get your project done in a timely manner and without bugs). DON’T USE MAGENTO. You’ll regret it…
I’ve played with Zen, os, Uber and Magento. Magento had the slickest interface of them all, however I found it very difficult to do everything. The template system was such a pain, most people won’t even figure out how to swap out a logo easily. The documentation was extremely bad and it’s difficult to find information. And It seemed rather bloated to me. I ended up deleting it after 3 days of playing with it.
I haven’t tried Ubercart of eCommerce for Drupal on Drupal 6 yet, I’ll have to give that a shot.
You know something is wrong when you unzip it and it’s 60 megs for the app. Great concept, best out there feature wise. If it was faster and lighter it would be great. I think they need to go back and refactor a lot of the code.
Mangento is very slow shopping cart system. I will never want to use it again! then I change to use opencart which is a lot better than Mangento!! at least I can do anything I want in my shop!
Magento templates really are a nightmare. We use Interspire’s shopping cart and it takes about 2 hours to integrate a template, so a lot quicker. We’ve worked with Magento, X-Cart, OsCommerce, but Interspire is the winner for us. What prompted this write up of Magento anyway? Seems like a marketing ploy disguised as a blog about free templates. FYI Interspire ship with over 50 free (and much better quality) templates out of the box.
We are also developing a small webshop with Magento and I can tell that this is a pretty slick but complex system with it’s strange/new templating system. Takes a LOT of time to learn, although best interface all around.
I’ve been using OSCommerce for years and I’m sorry to say it’s days are numbered. It takes forever to do alot of the things that only take a few seconds with Magento and it needs many addons to look somewhat respectable.
We’re in the process of switching to Magento and I must say it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. Design wise and architecturally it’s the best thing we’ve ever done for our business (assaultshirts.com)
Should only take me a few weeks what took me months with OSCommerce. Big ups to bigcartel too, they’ve got a great thing going there.
We have been using OScommerce for long but We’re in the process of switching to Magento and I must say it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.
Magento is definitely the frontrunner in the open source ecommerce market, but there is no option for digital products yet. This is in their roadmap though, so you may want to take a look to see when it will be available.
I have some experience with Magento. It is very powerful, but it needs a heavy server, and can be quite difficult to customize. Templating is not as easy as you’d hope. Also, Magento is overkill if all you want is a small shop.
My personal opinion of Magento is quite high. I believe they are much much better than the osCommerce days.
If anyone on here thinks that X-cart is a decent solution – as opposed to the worst piece of shit ever – you are high on crack.
I have spent THOUSANDS of dollars with seasoned PHP Professionals to try to make this travesty of an application work, paid X-cart hundreds of dollars to fix their own product, and it’s still the worst piece of shit ever. Everyone agrees.
ANYONE wanting to use this product. I BEG you to shoot yourself in the face and then burn every dollar you own. You will save time, money and headaches.