Comments on: Magento Commerce – A First Look

By: Leeds

Leeds — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 05:10:31 +0000

Also interested in an updated review of the new version. Seeing some horror stories in reading about the software tonight but it looks very promising at face value. Is it all marketing hype or is this a great package?

By: Damu

Damu — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 03:42:39 +0000

What a great review. @Mudassar yes it still has the issue with multiple urls for same product and is extremely slow. But, the system is amazing. Only thing we need is powerful server and lot of space to store cache.

By: Mudassar

Mudassar — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:29:51 +0000

Hi Kevin, Currently Magento 1.6.0.0 is available. Can you please confirm if it has taken care of those issues you have mentioned above 1) Multiple URLs and 2) Slow page loads. Please give your opinion on it.

By: Vikram

Vikram — Mon, 30 May 2011 06:15:55 +0000

Can anyone comment on how far Magento has come form where it began. Kevin wrote this piece in 2008. I want to know, in 2011 is Magento all set to be patronized as a long term solution for churning our E Commerce websites by E Commerce development companies?

By: vbsaltydog

vbsaltydog — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:56:01 +0000

I have been an e-commerce developer (Perl/PHP/Javascript) for years and have worked with many different carts, some free and some commercial, and Although I have only just installed Magento 1.5.0.1, I found the wiki very well written for the multiple installation options and I installed Magento in minutes via the shell which is an option that most carts dont even offer. The installation went very smoothly and the Magento front end is fast enough. There is alway room for improvement but the speed is acceptable.

Overall, my INITIAL impression of Magento is that is is a solid open source (GPL) e-commerce application and is miles ahead of OSC/ZenCart.

By: shivun

shivun — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 22:49:21 +0000

Folks

A great post that has lasted quite sometime by the looks of it. We’ve got quite a few magento sites running and its been a constant learning curve.

To date it’s one of the best, using silver stripe, expression engine and word press.

shivun

Interactive Hive

The web design & Search Marketing Agency

By: Scott Fadler

Scott Fadler — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:29:39 +0000

I’ve been using http://1automationwiz.com/ for some time and I really like the ease of which it can be inserted into Wordpress installations but there are some drawbacks one being that I cant publish to mobile devices easily. The mobile cart alone is a huge reason to check out Magento.

Thanks a lot =D

By: Magento webshop

Magento webshop — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 22:19:09 +0000

Magento changed my company so far, it’s amazing how professional it is comparing it to oscommerce and virtuemart.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 14:34:20 +0000

@NoMagento – well it sounds like you’ve had one hell of a time with Magento. I’m not going to deny these things do happen, but it’s all about how the developer you’re working with knows Magento. I’m not talking about someone on elance or odesk that says they know Magento, I’m talking about someone with true experience working heavily with the platform. What we’ve found with most companies that have problems with Magento – is that more often than not, all issues were attributed to poor development. Each one of your complaints is readily addressed by someone who knows what they’re doing:

(1) We have many, many clients with production websites on virtual servers with much less resources than you point out. It all depends on your load and the size of your catalog, but as a complex platform, Magento does require more resources than your typical. When you take into account it has 10 times more features than Virtuemart you might expect this kind of thing.

(2) Not an issue for our clients, if you’re getting lots of errors and crashing with Magento – something is wrong with your Magento site/code and whoever developed it.

(3) We just did an upgrade from 1.3 to 1.4 in about an hour – no issues (and there were numerous customizations to the site). Certainly it could take more time than that, but if your site was developed correctly you’ll avoid lots of issues here.

(4) Lost sales is rarely attributed to any one platform or another – but more to do with performance, and the design of the site, and the ordering process.

“In the end, its the number of sales not the amount of widgets that keeps you going.” – Agree with you there

“If you would like to have something stable / fast / reliable; Magento is not for you.” – disagree with you there, and we have many clients to back that up on Community Edition

By: NoMagento

NoMagento — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:01:26 +0000

Upgraded from from virtuamart to Magento;

Lessons learned:
1. Had to triple to the hardware to have load time less than 10sec per page. Joomla virtuamart run fast on on a single core zeon with 4Gb of ram, Now I run on dual quad cores with 16Gb of ram and max out cpu / disk io at each newsletter send.

2. Virtuamart was not perfect – but once it was fixed it run with no admin / coding for months at a end. Magento keeps on crashing out of the blue, with random error messages which are hard to reproduce.

3. No easy upgrades – expect to spend many late nights fixing failed upgrade scripts and restoring database dumps.

4. Magento has a lots of cool features, but they come at a price, we lost nearly 30% in sales after [upgrading] to Magento.

In the end, its the number of sales not the amount of widgets that keeps you going.

If you like to tinker with php and xml and / or have the money to sign up for Enterprise, Magento comes highly recommend.

If you would like to have something stable / fast / reliable; Magento is not for you.