8 June 2008
Magento vs the world
Posted by Opinioneer under: On My Projects .
I haven’t written in a long time but late is better than never.
I have spent the last few weeks evaluating e-commerce platforms and I’ve been trying to make one platform in particular work for my needs.
Well, you can’t turn a donkey into a race horse.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time on Magento. It is a new open source e-commerce platform that, quite frankly, is one of the best I have seen. It has great features, fantastic back-end, and in theory is easy to customize. But all that is somewhat theoretical.
One thing that it has going for it for sure is its design. It has the best designed admin panel. Period. It also has a few features that are quite unique and won’t be found elsewhere. But this post is not about all that.
Once you get past the “wow” factor, or, ” is this really open source?”, and you start playing with it, a few ugly heads start appearing.
It is SLOW. And I mean unacceptably slow by any standards. I have tried installations in dedicated servers and it still is SLOW. That, right there, ended the love affair for me.
The back-end, admin panel, can be confusing. I am running a cheap shopping cart script that does pretty much everything you would want it to do, and it is so much simpler to learn, a 10 year old could operate it. Not to mention that it is at least 10 times as fast.
So don’t let the “open source” free software fool you. It certainly wasted plenty of my time, effort and money, and delayed my plans for launching a store by several months, only to come to the conclusion that Magento is still too young to come out and play.
Having said that, given that it still is in version 1.0, once it grows up a bit, I am certain it will be one of the best solutions out there. And I say one of the best, because by the time it is ready for prime time, I am sure there will be more competition.
Even then, Magento is not for everybody. If you are just launching a shop you are better off with another solution. I foresee myself migrating to Magento a year from now, depending how my plans progress, depending where Magento is then, and assuming no other solution is offering the one unique feature that initially got me interested in Magento.
To wrap this one up, don’t be fooled by open source. As much as I am I big proponent of it, it is cheaper to pay a monthly fee for a hosted solution from an established provider, than trying to make Magento work. Just the hosting fees to run Magento on a decent host, in order to have decent speeds, are more expensive than paying a hosted, tried and tested solution.
Nevertheless, keep an eye out for it. It has potential.
