Magento Commerce
If you need a heavyweight solution for complex shopping cart requirements and you are willing to hire our professionals, Magento is certainly worth consideration. Magento is not a magic-potion. It can tax even the most skilled coders. Nevertheless, the software and the large number of low-cost and no-cost modules provide a serious platform for serious e-commerce sites. However, for simpler eCommerce solutions we would recommend our DTW Commerce solution to you.
Magento is a great cart for companies with a dedicated server as it may demand a lot of server resources. Your company will also need to work with a team of experts like us. You cannot expect to have this software launched over the Internet over the weekend. It may take weeks to months of work. This cart requires competence in not only the LAMP stack but Zend, XML, the InnoDB storage engine. In the end you can have just what you need in your shopping cart for a much reduced cost than building your solution completely custom from scratch. For smaller projects, however, this is a extremely bloated software and a resource hog!
Why Magento?
Magento is a free open source shopping cart software. 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.
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.
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!
Why NOT Magento?
Magento has an excellent API; it is very easy to connect third party software like warehouse application as well as very powerful Attributes section and product cloning. However, there is a very messy directory structure and even if you want to install a single plugin you need to add something in your template as well, which is very confusing. There is no single way to add module like best seller or most viewed products by users. You need to know at least XML and to know how and where to place the code. Another bad thing is the lack of core developer's support.
Magento is a complex, intricate platform built on top of the Zend Framework. Magento 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. If you want to customize Magento properly, any request will take our developers longer than if we 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.
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.
Bottomline
Magento has incredible potential, but it is currently convoluted and incomplete as is. The most simple actions, like getting categories to display, required trips to the support forums. On the forums often mods instruct people to rewrite errors in the program's code - something that should never happen with a shipped product. Plan on having a good budget if you want to customize your cart a lot. The files are situated like a haphazard, crisscrossing maze of interacting XML and PHTML files. Instead of placing styles in one location (as we would in CSS), adjustments require us to dig through multiple, poorly labeled PHTML to find what we are searching for. Then we have to dig through the XML files to make sure that your change is only affecting the one feature.
We would only use Magento as a MVC framework, if we are to develop a rather large system for you. However, for small, straight forward tasks we would much rather stick with our other favorite paid carts.
