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Magento Open Source is an ecommerce content management solution originally developed by Varien Inc and presently supported by Adobe. The Open Source product is for developers and merchants that is available as a free download, and supported with free upgrades from the Magento Community.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/Uw/AB/1F0U2C8PXHKN.PNGAdobeUse Magento Open Source If You Are A Medium-Sized Business Who Wants A Simple And Affordable Website2019-08-16T20:04:41.143ZWe use the open-source version of Magento for many of our web design clients who want a fast and affordable eCommerce platform with some flexibility is its customization potential. The open-source code allows us to customize the features and functionality of the shopping cart so they work in specific ways the client may require. Online purchasing is made simple and affordable from the client's point of view.,Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.,Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.,7,Magneto improves our client's ROI by streamlining online orders and payments.
Bulk catalog changes via .csv files enhance productivity and management time.
Magento's compatibility with QuickBooks improves ROI by improving efficiency.,OpenCart and Shopify,OpenCart, CakePHP, ASP.NET,$20,000 to $100,000,Both.Kim MurphyIs Magento the Best eCommerce Platform? Opace Say Yes2018-12-26T17:43:20.349ZOur agency Opace use Magento day-in-day-out for e-commerce clients, we also specialize in other open source platforms, including WordPress, WooCommerce and Joomla. However for e-commerce, especially larger stores with large inventories and/or an international presence, Magento is always our platform of choice and we find that customers are usually very happy with the solution. The one limitation, where a combination like WordPress and WooCommerce outperforms Magento, is ease-of-use and flexibility. Magento isn't the most straight forward of platforms to use or maintain, not without some level of technical knowledge. That said, Magento is very powerful and migrations to Magento 2 are becoming more straight forward. For more information on a study we've conducted and a comparison to other e-commerce platforms available, you can view our infographic here.,Multiple storefronts - the ability to power multiple Magento stores from a single install/database.
Extensibility - the ability to grow your e-commerce store using the vast selection of available extensions.,Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective
Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience
Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work.,8,Better Total Cost of Ownership than bespoke e-commerce solutions due to being open source and the wide range of free/commercial extensions available to extend the platform.
Often more extensive to set up and maintain than other open source alternatives, such as WooCommerce.,WooCommerce,WooCommerce, WordPress, Joomla!,Not available,BothDavid BryanApparently Open Source means lower publishing standards. Be prepare to hire a software developer.2018-11-30T18:52:41.119ZMagento CE is our current eCommerce platform in a business which also has a B2B and Retail units. We conducted the upgrade from WooCommerce after experience of outages and problems which were limiting growth. Currently online customers use this platform for direct ordering, our marketing team does some design work, and customer service accesses the platform to find order-related information. We planned the development to allow for growth into a B2B ordering platform and potentially more.,Magento 2 CE has a very robust document workflow which mirrors most mid-large ERP systems. There's a "papertrail" which mimics your business processes, and each part of the process is exposed to the API which makes for some great integration potential.
Magento 2 CE is also great for tracking customer history, saves a record for each and allows you to understand customer interests better.
Magento 2 CE is highly expandable, with a full marketplace of free and premium modules that should accomplish some pretty niche sales or service goals.,Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.,3,Delays in development leads to missed timelines and opportunity loss.
High cost of development and maintenance may currently outweigh the growth.
Better handling of customer and order information makes for better customer service.
Excellent API has been a boon for integration with our ERP,WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Shopify Plus,WooCommerce, Avaza, Vagrant, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe Photoshop, Final Cut Pro X,$20,000 to $100,000,B2CBrendon BrownMagento Matured.2019-03-12T19:34:36.108ZWe are currently in the process of migrating our main retail website over to the Magento 2 platform -- this would be the open source or community version. The primary business problem this addressed was the requirement to integrate with our current point of sale solution, NCR Counterpoint. As stated, we are currently using this platform for our retail website only, but we have plans to roll this out to our wholesale division as well in the near future.,As a shopping cart platform, version 2 has matured fully. The built-in feature set is immense.
Extensions -- there are extensions for virtually every need and vision
Intuitive backend -- it's very easy to work with and find things-- again, in version 2. Order management is a breeze, and the level of customer data access that's built-in is huge.
A clean modern front end -- from standard/simple templates to the more expensive paid templates, Magento websites are clean, clear, and they work very well.,Cache management -- I think this should work better OOBE. Lots of manual flushing of caches, and tricky setup for automation.
It's very expensive to develop on the platform -- it's time-consuming for me, and expensive when hiring outside people.
Some things that are baked in, like shipping rates (USPS), can be improved to grab internet rates.
Need more US-based extension developers and ways to work with them when code needs to be rewritten...,10,ROI -- that's a tough one. It's a pricey platform to launch on. Coming from the BigCommerce platform, which is relatively cheap, and where most of the design was handled in-house, the M2 platform is quite a bit more expensive as we outsourced most of the dev and the ongoing is much higher. I'd say at these early stages, we're well in the negatives with ROI.
Now on the positive side -- I see the potential of the platform. Once we get the marketing down, and the traffic levels raised, I see the ROI leveling out very quickly. This is a platform meant for growth, so as growth is pushed, we'll be ready to scale and handle it effectively.
All in all, I'd project that we'd be in the green on the ROI within 3 years (start of project through new site launch through year 3) with nothing but future growth in front of us as we learn and continue to develop the site over time.,BigCommerce, Volusion and Shopify,NCR Counterpoint, QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Pro, Accounting by Wave,$100,000 to $500,000,BothVin CampbellMagento is a Heavy Hitter; Make Sure You Can Carry It2019-01-07T16:58:12.396ZWe help manage, update, maintain and customize websites built with Magento Open Source (Community Edition) - among many other CMSs and frameworks - for our clients. Magento enables building highly customizable e-commerce websites, with a solid core set of features and a large variety of extensions available to extend it further, and a framework that allows further extension by an expert programmer.,Flexibility of code - almost any part of the system can be customized
Extensions - high availability of free and paid pre-built extensions
Documentation - for the latest iteration (2.x)
Multi-language/Internationalization
Multi-store websites,Updates - historically patches and updates, due to the frequent high customization, can be difficult
User Experience of Management - managing the store is not as intuitive as some other systems
Frontend Development and templating - while very flexible and modular, they are much more complex than many other systems,8,As a framework, it allows more efficient implementation of many features (depending on the feature and what you compare it to)
The options for customization open up many possibilities,WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce and X-Cart,Kinsta,Not available,BothChris PutnamMagento Helps Us Achieve Our eCommerce Strategy2018-12-14T17:50:59.838ZOur company uses the Magento eCommerce platform to sell retail bowling equipment to thousands of customers around the world. Magento is flexible to configure to our needs as we've implemented many different extensions from payment gateways, search engine optimization, upgraded search features, and more. What's nice is that we've been able to launch multiple stores using the same install and database. I would recommend this platform for companies that have a lot of products and need the flexibility to add a lot of categories and product attributes.,Ability to create unlimited attributes and attribute sets to describe products
Ability to launch multiple stores with one install
Tons of extensions available to integrate and optimize an eCommerce store,Resource intensive, recommended that you host this on a dedicated server
Updating site layout is not intuitive, developers may be needed at an additional expense
Extensions can be costly, and typically developers are needed to install,8,Magento has definitely had a positive ROI on our business helping us gain market share acquiring thousands of new customers,WooCommerce,WooCommerce, WordPress, Yotpo,$100,000 to $500,000,B2CBrian HalstromMagento Open Source is ideal for large e-commerce shops2018-12-06T19:00:36.196ZMagento Open Source is my top selection for large/complex e-commerce websites. There is really no better open-source e-commerce solution that can scale for large shops or accommodate specialty customizations. I use Magento for my clients that need a platform that can scale with thousands of products or complex product configurations.,Scalability is excellent, Magento Open Source can handle hundreds, thousands, ten thousands of products.
Inventory management is excellent.
Excellent set of core features and extensions to expand and extend it are exhaustive.
The community behind Magento is top-notch.,Magento can be difficult to learn for a non-technical person, and requires an experienced developer to set it up properly.
To really get the most of out Magento, you must run it on on a dedicated server with extensive server customizations.
Not really geared for small shops - I don't recommend it for little e-commerce websites.,9,Magento makes scaling for large e-commerce websites easy, saving time and money when its time to grow large shops.
Magento has a strong core system which is easily extendable with an experienced developer.
Magento has an excellent community behind it that makes finding answers easy.,WooCommerce,$20,000 to $100,000,BothVerified UserMagento - the developer's choice in e-commerce platforms2018-09-25T15:25:55.301ZWe are a software company that builds e-commerce sites for companies. We mostly use Magento because it is very flexible and powerful and we are able to integrate it with any other 3rd party system as needed. Our sites are built for both B2B and B2C (direct sales) companies.,Magento is fully extendable so that you can accomplish any special needs for a client without having to build a custom site.
Magento is powerful and fast on the proper web server. It can handle a huge number of products and customers successfully.
Magento has a very flexible catalog structure so that you can sell most any type of product or product combination.
Magento is easy to integrate with other systems.
Magento is great for non-technical people to be able to update content, as it's also a full CMS system.,Magento is well known for its bugs in early releases of each version. Luckily, there is a great community always providing temporary fixes and patches.
Magento should allow you to add user-defined fields for customers. It allows you do do this for products, but for customers, you must be able to program in order to create user-defined fields.
Magento should have built-in support for dimensional shipping methods. I think in general the shipping integrations are weak. Most people need to purchase add-ons to get really accurate shipping rates.,9,Magento will definitely give you a good ROI if you are prepared to invest in a good site. Even B2B companies are more and more expected to provide online resources for their customers. Magento, being easily customized to work with any 3rd party system, allows you to provide these resources to help you keep and grow your customer base.
A well-designed site will also increase your search rankings and draw more traffic to your site.
Being easily incorporated with Google Analytics and Tag Manager, you can tweak your site to increase traffic and sales.,BigCommerce and WooCommerce,Trello, Slack, Google Drive, Evernote,Not available,BothLynn ThamesScalable but expensive to customize2018-08-27T19:03:00.813ZWe used Magento as an eCommerce solution for our company. We sell lots of different products, so scalability was an issue and we were recommended to use Magento. We didn't use it as fulfillment, only for processing orders and everything else was done outside of it. We published products from an API outside the store too.,Magento scales very well. That means if you keep adding more products, there's no significant performance decline. This sounds like a very technical and unuseful thing but actually it's very important and depends heavily on the type of eCommerce solution you are providing. In our case, we were supposed to have many products (+15,000) so we never have many scale issues with it.
Exporting information works reasonably well. It is relatively fast and has decent built-in capabilities.
Attributes are well built considering other eCommerce options. It's very flexible and you can modify many things, including brands, easily.
Multistore (differente languages/places) seems to work fine but we didn't use it. I'm just referring to what I've read,The community around Magento is very poor compared to other software. We migrated to WooCommerce and definitely there's more support there. More plugins, extensions, developers, etc., and at a reasonable price. This is one of the key points why we migrated. Magento is very expensive and slow to develop here. For WooCommerce there are plugins for everything, from popular analytics software to loyalty. This is a HUGE point to consider.
Debugging is painful. Some times you get an error that shut downs your entire store, and why did it happen? No clue. There's no documentation, there are 20,000+ files and at least for us, the framework on which it is built is not that user-friendly. This is expensive and there are not that many options compared to other software.
Changing the design or making changes is also very hard, because of the framework, the many files, and how complex Magento is.,8,It definitely let us start with a decent store and scale from 0 to 15,000 products without many performance issues. But that comes with a cost: we were unable to change the design of the checkout, SEO was poor, and adding banners or more store-related things was very time consuming.
Debugging is hard and you will break your head with some errors that break your store, and you don't know how to solve them. This was one of the reasons why we left it.,WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Shopify,PrestaShop, Dropbox, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office 2016,$100,000 to $500,000,B2CSantiago ValdésThe best platform for large-scale e-commerce but maybe not the best for hobbyist or startups.2018-04-30T15:54:10.797ZWe are a digital marketing company specializing in web design and SEO. Our company has been building Magento websites for years for our clients. For both large and small scale clients, Magento has been implemented to serve as an e-commerce platform has overall has been very successful. Since we primarily deal with small to medium-sized businesses who have no in-office IT department, we often find ourselves supporting the websites as well.
Magento has allowed us to build sophisticated and feature-rich stores for clients who are looking to sell their product online. It is easy to set up, easy to maintain and reasonably easy to navigate.,Magento makes it easy to build out sophisticated pricing options as our clients usually have a complicated pricing structure.
For the most part, setting up Magento is easy and straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days of custom coding.
The newly designed UI is so much easier to use. With the old design, we found it difficult to navigate and so did our clients. The newly designed UI is a huge improvement.,I am not a big fan of the extensions directory and all of the paid upgrades. There are some basic features that I feel should be included but you have to pay for. By comparison, WooCommerce is better in that regard.,8,When it comes to e-commerce implementation, Magento is the more expensive. The cost for the developers is higher along with the cost of themes and the required extensions to make the platform do all the things that you need it to.
While it does not have any direct bearing on the platform itself we have found the theme installation is always a headache. In all the years that we've been dealing with Magento, we have never done a theme install in under three hours.
Magento does offer an extreme amount of customization far beyond any of its competitors. If there are special task or systems that need to be implemented for the client the Magento is definitely the way to go. Creating subscriptions or recurring orders is much simpler than WooCommerce. We have also found that shipping and payment integrations are also much more flexible and customizable using Magento.,WooCommerce, Shopify and OpenCart,WooCommerce, OpenCart, Shopify,$20,000 to $100,000,BothMax J. JenningsOur site would not exist without Magento Open Source2018-08-17T17:34:07.681ZWe currently use Magento Open Source to manage our ecommerce website. We have been using it for years and have had great success. Our website development team uses Magento Open Source. This includes our e-ops team, UX team and back-end developers. It allows us to manage all the products, shipping rates, taxes, multiple stores across multiple countries, SEO, categories, redirects, etc. It really takes care of most needs we have for our site.,Magento Open Source allows us to manage thousands of products in an easy to view and edit manner. We can make bulk changes to hundreds of products when necessary in just a few minutes.
Magento Open Source is incredibly flexible from a developers perspective. We have been able to develop many custom solutions that Magento Open Source didn't offer out of the box without any difficulty.
Magento Open Source allows us to pull reports very quickly. The product grid screen (Manage Products) allows you to customize the data columns you see which allows you to pull a report of just the data you want. We use this multiple times per day to see data on our catalog.
Magento Open Source makes it very easy to set URL redirects when we change product pages or category structure. This is incredibly useful in our daily use of Magento.,Like I mentioned previously, Magento Open Source allows us to develop custom solutions for areas where it did not offer a feature out of the box. While the ease of development is good, had these features been available out of the box, it would have been even better.
We occasionally find that some third party vendors do not work well with Magento Open Source. We have had to come up with work-arounds or abandon certain vendors all together because of our use of Magento Open Source.
This isn't really a drawback of Magento Open Source itself, but finding developers that are familiar with Magento can be difficult.
When you are first getting familiar with Magento Open Source, navigating the menus can be very intimidating. There are seemingly hundreds of pages and tabs in Magento and until you are familiar with it, you can very easily get lost.,8,I think it is safe to say that without Magento Open Source we would not have a business so Magento has had an incredibly positive impact on our business. We essentially manage our entire website with Magento Open Source.
A "negative" impact is that some features were not available out of the box and we had to go to outside vendors or spend time developing custom solutions on our own. This obviously cost us money in the short term.
While Magento Open Source is complicated to learn, once you do pretty much anyone in our department is able to jump in and perform any task that they need done. The learning curve is a little steep, but it is very accessible once you know how to use it.,Bazaarvoice Conversations, Adobe Analytics, Reflektion,More than $100 million,B2CVerified UserPowerful ecommerce solution2018-03-28T16:53:48.542ZWe use Magento Community Edition as our solution for e-commerce retailing.,Compared to other solutions, Magento has far more control over exact nuances of e-commerce such as discounting, customer segmentation, and multi-site control.
Magento as a whole is reliable and can be made very fast thanks to built-in fullpage caching on Magento 2.
Magento is scalable and can handle huge traffic, or it can be built for a small site.,Small bugs and issues affecting performance could be handled more quickly, but the rate of bug fixes and improvements is much better now than it used to be!
The built-in image lightbox uses an extension that is no longer supported. This could be improved.
Extensions from "certified developers" are often buggy or extremely unreliable. A better certification process for third-party extensions could save a lot of time and stress for users.,8,We have been able to succeed in e-commerce with Magento.
We have been able to implement many custom features requested by customers through the flexibility of Magento.,,QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions, Webgility,$1 to $10 million,BothVerified UserMagento is a robust but complex e-commerce solution2017-09-19T17:51:51.928ZWe have implemented Magento CE as the e-commerce management solution for clients.,Comes with APIs built-in
Lots of extensibility and customizability
Can handle a very large product catalog,Magento is complicated to use and has a high learning curve from a management user point of view.
We found it difficult to upgrade when newer releases came out.
The front-end templating system seems needlessly obtuse and is difficult to develop. Smaller front-end elements are individual files and layouts are controlled through XML files.,6,Too much time has been spent on development of the Magento implementation and maintenance that should have been spent on marketing and customer experience improvements.,BigCommerce, Shopify and Squarespace,WordPress, Shopify, Hotjar,Not available,BothMatt RaileyMagento Community Edition Review2017-07-18T21:56:54.296ZWe use Magento as our eCommerce platform across our 4 sites. It is mostly used by the eCommerce team directly, however, we have trained brick and mortar employees to use simple functions custom made specifically for them to help with order fulfillment.,Easy WYSIWYG editor
Compatible with hundreds of platforms
Pre-built extensions,Security patching causes long term development downtime
Not the quickest platform,8,Constant development required, expensive
Extensions can cover 90% of requirements, but usually still need some customisation.,Shopify,dotMailer,$10 to $50 million,B2CJoe DingleyMagento Community Edition - a Great Place to Start and Grow Online Sales2017-04-13T21:06:53.129ZMagento is the primary CMS used for e-commerce across the market for good reason. It's open source and built specifically for e-commerce, and the best part of this CMS is it's FREE! It's not as popular a CMS as Wordpress, but Wordpress isn't built specifically for e-commerce and is well know for it's security issues. It's a great place to start, and can scale with your business as you grow. The benefits of being able to start out for free and grow your online business are difficult to beat.,As stated before, it's open source and it's free.
Magento CE is scalable as you continue to grow your online business.
It is high performance, and highly scalable.
A key benefit to being open source is that there's a large community and plenty of developer support.,If you have a large number of products, performance will degrade continually. 10-20 products is no problem but 20,000 or more and there's a noticeable slowdown.
Your site will not load quickly with community edition.
It's difficult to roll back changes if you make a modification by mistake. Backup/restore options are not great with CE.,8,It has made calculating tax owed much simpler overall compared to other e-commerce CMS we've used.
Compared to using the Enterprise edition it saves $15,000/year in licensing fees.
It has increased our customer retention by over 50% compared to our previous platform because we can provide better product updates end to end.,,QuickBooks Pro, Amazon Cloud Drive, WordPress, Google Drive,$100,000 to $500,000,BothNick JastrebskiMagento CE provides the out of the box functionality for your online retail presence2017-03-30T21:47:30.124ZWe implement and provide support for Magento Community Edition for most of our clients. Most of our clients are needing a platform that offers products to buy and Magento meets those needs very well. It has a base setup from which you can build off of with modules and custom theming to provide the experience the clients need to present to their customers.,Out of the box product display allows for you to quickly get your products shown to the consumers
Customizable product options allow for a wide variety of selection of products
Customizable payment and shipping options allow for many different use-case scenarios for the consumer.,It is still using a lot of xml for it's configuration which can make things complicated.
Updating has gotten better, but very specific requirements make it difficult at times.
Very specific requirements for installing also make it difficult.,8,It has allowed us to greatly expand the business to quality clients.
We can build a level of expertise in a particular platform on a niche market.,Drupal and OroCRM,Laravel PHP Framework, MongoDB,$1 to $10 million,BothChris CoppenbargerMagento CE is a cost effective solution for your E-Commerce website.2017-03-29T15:22:22.034ZAs a web developer, I use Magento CE for some of my clients. We build them a website using the CMS system. It is a very efficient system as it helps our clients quickly and cheaply get their product/service out there.,It is a great solution for mid to large sized E-Commerce companies who want to quickly get their product to market
It's cost effective as there are a number of extensions available extending the capabilities of the system.
The websites created using Magento CE are responsive and ready to set up. Just upload a few products and modify some colors and you're good to go.,One feature of Magento CE that I feel needs improvement is with the structure of the system. Many of the important SEO factors like minifying the CSS files don't work without causing some issues on the site. It does take someone skilled to get a site working properly. It's not built for the novice in mind.,8,With the resurgence of the Los Angeles fashion industry, many companies are looking to upgrade their older sites. Magento CE provides that solution. It is a quick and efficient CMS system.
Pricing for building one of these websites has come down in recent years as more and more extensions become available. This is expanding the capabilities of the system to do even more customized solutions.,,Shopify, WordPress, BigCommerce,Not available,BothBrian KearyMagento CE Solves SMB E-commerce Needs2014-09-25T22:00:18.136ZWe use Magento CE for our www.MageRevolution.com website. We also have done many installations for clients. Magento CE allows us to build robust, flexible, enterprise level e-commerce solutions are a much more affordable level than many comparable systems. We have clients with as many as 90,000 sku's and, if installed and tuned properly, Magento is capable of providing a rich shopping experience. In addition, there are so many resources available that a Magento store owner won't feel isolated or restricted by their developer or platform.,Flexibility to add or enhance functionality as needed.
Great assortment of inexpensive add-ons and designs, although care should be taken to insure compatibility and use.
Low cost of entry relative to other robust systems.,Despite its popularity, successful implementation requires not only an in-depth experience with Magento, but true knowledge of how e-commerce works. It is a complex platform with poor, Magento-provided documentation.
Many — you could almost say "most" — of the add-ons created for Magento are not of great quality. There are plenty that are, but you have to be very careful.
Designers may feel overwhelmed by the complex template structure.,10,Greater ability to meet unique customer business rules.
Greater flexibility in adding functionality and designs.
Greater access to ready-made add-ons and integrations.,Bigcommerce,OpenCart,Adobe Business Catalyst,Shopify,WooCommerce,10Bret WilliamsUnspecified
Magento Open Source
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August 16, 2019
Use Magento Open Source If You Are A Medium-Sized Business Who Wants A Simple And Affordable Website
We use the open-source version of Magento for many of our web design clients who want a fast and affordable eCommerce platform with some flexibility is its customization potential. The open-source code allows us to customize the features and functionality of the shopping cart so they work in specific ways the client may require. Online purchasing is made simple and affordable from the client's point of view.
- Magento is perfect if our web design client likes a specific pre-made template and wants a fast solution.
- Magento allows us to customize its open-source code to create additional features and functionality.
- Magento saves small businesses time and money if they only need a simple solution.
- Magento is not easy for a layman who is not tech-savvy to manage the website.
- Magento is one of the only modern shopping carts in which one must manually clear the cache and "reindex".
- Magneto has a lot of technical glitches - more than most of the other shopping carts we work with. Most are minor.
December 26, 2018
Is Magento the Best eCommerce Platform? Opace Say Yes
Our agency Opace use Magento day-in-day-out for e-commerce clients, we also specialize in other open source platforms, including WordPress, WooCommerce and Joomla. However for e-commerce, especially larger stores with large inventories and/or an international presence, Magento is always our platform of choice and we find that customers are usually very happy with the solution. The one limitation, where a combination like WordPress and WooCommerce outperforms Magento, is ease-of-use and flexibility. Magento isn't the most straight forward of platforms to use or maintain, not without some level of technical knowledge. That said, Magento is very powerful and migrations to Magento 2 are becoming more straight forward. For more information on a study we've conducted and a comparison to other e-commerce platforms available, you can view our infographic here.
- Multiple storefronts - the ability to power multiple Magento stores from a single install/database.
- Extensibility - the ability to grow your e-commerce store using the vast selection of available extensions.
- Not the simplest of solutions to use or maintain from an end-user perspective
- Other platforms are better with regards to SEO in our experience
- Fairly sluggish and slow compared to other platforms without the correct server specification and performance optimization work.
November 30, 2018
Apparently Open Source means lower publishing standards. Be prepare to hire a software developer.
Magento CE is our current eCommerce platform in a business which also has a B2B and Retail units. We conducted the upgrade from WooCommerce after experience of outages and problems which were limiting growth. Currently online customers use this platform for direct ordering, our marketing team does some design work, and customer service accesses the platform to find order-related information. We planned the development to allow for growth into a B2B ordering platform and potentially more.
- Magento 2 CE has a very robust document workflow which mirrors most mid-large ERP systems. There's a "papertrail" which mimics your business processes, and each part of the process is exposed to the API which makes for some great integration potential.
- Magento 2 CE is also great for tracking customer history, saves a record for each and allows you to understand customer interests better.
- Magento 2 CE is highly expandable, with a full marketplace of free and premium modules that should accomplish some pretty niche sales or service goals.
- Magento 2 community is full of known and new bugs with long-pending pull requests and the community is on the hook for changes. Submit an very obvious issue to the github repo, and you will likely be met with a "this is open source and you use at your own risk." I counter this poor attitude with the fact that open source community has standards, and we do not label a "release" until those standards are met. Otherwise it's just a alpha, beta or numbered build. We don't release obviously bad software until it's fully working.
- Magento is expensive to maintain. You will need a well-paid php developer with apache and hosting knowledge, or you will have to hire an external firm. Either option will turn your website into an additional $100k/yr cost center, so you'd better be ready to ramp up sales. Every feature update or bugfix in the past year has uncovered more bugs, which my devs fix, but at the cost of timelines and billed hours way outside of my budget and target dates.
March 12, 2019
Magento Matured.
We are currently in the process of migrating our main retail website over to the Magento 2 platform -- this would be the open source or community version. The primary business problem this addressed was the requirement to integrate with our current point of sale solution, NCR Counterpoint. As stated, we are currently using this platform for our retail website only, but we have plans to roll this out to our wholesale division as well in the near future.
- As a shopping cart platform, version 2 has matured fully. The built-in feature set is immense.
- Extensions -- there are extensions for virtually every need and vision
- Intuitive backend -- it's very easy to work with and find things-- again, in version 2. Order management is a breeze, and the level of customer data access that's built-in is huge.
- A clean modern front end -- from standard/simple templates to the more expensive paid templates, Magento websites are clean, clear, and they work very well.
- Cache management -- I think this should work better OOBE. Lots of manual flushing of caches, and tricky setup for automation.
- It's very expensive to develop on the platform -- it's time-consuming for me, and expensive when hiring outside people.
- Some things that are baked in, like shipping rates (USPS), can be improved to grab internet rates.
- Need more US-based extension developers and ways to work with them when code needs to be rewritten...
January 07, 2019
Magento is a Heavy Hitter; Make Sure You Can Carry It
We help manage, update, maintain and customize websites built with Magento Open Source (Community Edition) - among many other CMSs and frameworks - for our clients. Magento enables building highly customizable e-commerce websites, with a solid core set of features and a large variety of extensions available to extend it further, and a framework that allows further extension by an expert programmer.
- Flexibility of code - almost any part of the system can be customized
- Extensions - high availability of free and paid pre-built extensions
- Documentation - for the latest iteration (2.x)
- Multi-language/Internationalization
- Multi-store websites
- Updates - historically patches and updates, due to the frequent high customization, can be difficult
- User Experience of Management - managing the store is not as intuitive as some other systems
- Frontend Development and templating - while very flexible and modular, they are much more complex than many other systems
December 14, 2018
Magento Helps Us Achieve Our eCommerce Strategy
Our company uses the Magento eCommerce platform to sell retail bowling equipment to thousands of customers around the world. Magento is flexible to configure to our needs as we've implemented many different extensions from payment gateways, search engine optimization, upgraded search features, and more. What's nice is that we've been able to launch multiple stores using the same install and database. I would recommend this platform for companies that have a lot of products and need the flexibility to add a lot of categories and product attributes.
- Ability to create unlimited attributes and attribute sets to describe products
- Ability to launch multiple stores with one install
- Tons of extensions available to integrate and optimize an eCommerce store
- Resource intensive, recommended that you host this on a dedicated server
- Updating site layout is not intuitive, developers may be needed at an additional expense
- Extensions can be costly, and typically developers are needed to install
December 06, 2018
Magento Open Source is ideal for large e-commerce shops
Magento Open Source is my top selection for large/complex e-commerce websites. There is really no better open-source e-commerce solution that can scale for large shops or accommodate specialty customizations. I use Magento for my clients that need a platform that can scale with thousands of products or complex product configurations.
- Scalability is excellent, Magento Open Source can handle hundreds, thousands, ten thousands of products.
- Inventory management is excellent.
- Excellent set of core features and extensions to expand and extend it are exhaustive.
- The community behind Magento is top-notch.
- Magento can be difficult to learn for a non-technical person, and requires an experienced developer to set it up properly.
- To really get the most of out Magento, you must run it on on a dedicated server with extensive server customizations.
- Not really geared for small shops - I don't recommend it for little e-commerce websites.
September 25, 2018
Magento - the developer's choice in e-commerce platforms
We are a software company that builds e-commerce sites for companies. We mostly use Magento because it is very flexible and powerful and we are able to integrate it with any other 3rd party system as needed. Our sites are built for both B2B and B2C (direct sales) companies.
- Magento is fully extendable so that you can accomplish any special needs for a client without having to build a custom site.
- Magento is powerful and fast on the proper web server. It can handle a huge number of products and customers successfully.
- Magento has a very flexible catalog structure so that you can sell most any type of product or product combination.
- Magento is easy to integrate with other systems.
- Magento is great for non-technical people to be able to update content, as it's also a full CMS system.
- Magento is well known for its bugs in early releases of each version. Luckily, there is a great community always providing temporary fixes and patches.
- Magento should allow you to add user-defined fields for customers. It allows you do do this for products, but for customers, you must be able to program in order to create user-defined fields.
- Magento should have built-in support for dimensional shipping methods. I think in general the shipping integrations are weak. Most people need to purchase add-ons to get really accurate shipping rates.
August 27, 2018
Scalable but expensive to customize
We used Magento as an eCommerce solution for our company. We sell lots of different products, so scalability was an issue and we were recommended to use Magento. We didn't use it as fulfillment, only for processing orders and everything else was done outside of it. We published products from an API outside the store too.
- Magento scales very well. That means if you keep adding more products, there's no significant performance decline. This sounds like a very technical and unuseful thing but actually it's very important and depends heavily on the type of eCommerce solution you are providing. In our case, we were supposed to have many products (+15,000) so we never have many scale issues with it.
- Exporting information works reasonably well. It is relatively fast and has decent built-in capabilities.
- Attributes are well built considering other eCommerce options. It's very flexible and you can modify many things, including brands, easily.
- Multistore (differente languages/places) seems to work fine but we didn't use it. I'm just referring to what I've read
- The community around Magento is very poor compared to other software. We migrated to WooCommerce and definitely there's more support there. More plugins, extensions, developers, etc., and at a reasonable price. This is one of the key points why we migrated. Magento is very expensive and slow to develop here. For WooCommerce there are plugins for everything, from popular analytics software to loyalty. This is a HUGE point to consider.
- Debugging is painful. Some times you get an error that shut downs your entire store, and why did it happen? No clue. There's no documentation, there are 20,000+ files and at least for us, the framework on which it is built is not that user-friendly. This is expensive and there are not that many options compared to other software.
- Changing the design or making changes is also very hard, because of the framework, the many files, and how complex Magento is.
April 30, 2018
The best platform for large-scale e-commerce but maybe not the best for hobbyist or startups.
We are a digital marketing company specializing in web design and SEO. Our company has been building Magento websites for years for our clients. For both large and small scale clients, Magento has been implemented to serve as an e-commerce platform has overall has been very successful. Since we primarily deal with small to medium-sized businesses who have no in-office IT department, we often find ourselves supporting the websites as well.
Magento has allowed us to build sophisticated and feature-rich stores for clients who are looking to sell their product online. It is easy to set up, easy to maintain and reasonably easy to navigate.
Magento has allowed us to build sophisticated and feature-rich stores for clients who are looking to sell their product online. It is easy to set up, easy to maintain and reasonably easy to navigate.
- Magento makes it easy to build out sophisticated pricing options as our clients usually have a complicated pricing structure.
- For the most part, setting up Magento is easy and straightforward. It's a lot easier than the old days of custom coding.
- The newly designed UI is so much easier to use. With the old design, we found it difficult to navigate and so did our clients. The newly designed UI is a huge improvement.
- I am not a big fan of the extensions directory and all of the paid upgrades. There are some basic features that I feel should be included but you have to pay for. By comparison, WooCommerce is better in that regard.
August 17, 2018
Our site would not exist without Magento Open Source
We currently use Magento Open Source to manage our ecommerce website. We have been using it for years and have had great success. Our website development team uses Magento Open Source. This includes our e-ops team, UX team and back-end developers. It allows us to manage all the products, shipping rates, taxes, multiple stores across multiple countries, SEO, categories, redirects, etc. It really takes care of most needs we have for our site.
- Magento Open Source allows us to manage thousands of products in an easy to view and edit manner. We can make bulk changes to hundreds of products when necessary in just a few minutes.
- Magento Open Source is incredibly flexible from a developers perspective. We have been able to develop many custom solutions that Magento Open Source didn't offer out of the box without any difficulty.
- Magento Open Source allows us to pull reports very quickly. The product grid screen (Manage Products) allows you to customize the data columns you see which allows you to pull a report of just the data you want. We use this multiple times per day to see data on our catalog.
- Magento Open Source makes it very easy to set URL redirects when we change product pages or category structure. This is incredibly useful in our daily use of Magento.
- Like I mentioned previously, Magento Open Source allows us to develop custom solutions for areas where it did not offer a feature out of the box. While the ease of development is good, had these features been available out of the box, it would have been even better.
- We occasionally find that some third party vendors do not work well with Magento Open Source. We have had to come up with work-arounds or abandon certain vendors all together because of our use of Magento Open Source.
- This isn't really a drawback of Magento Open Source itself, but finding developers that are familiar with Magento can be difficult.
- When you are first getting familiar with Magento Open Source, navigating the menus can be very intimidating. There are seemingly hundreds of pages and tabs in Magento and until you are familiar with it, you can very easily get lost.
March 28, 2018
Powerful ecommerce solution
We use Magento Community Edition as our solution for e-commerce retailing.
- Compared to other solutions, Magento has far more control over exact nuances of e-commerce such as discounting, customer segmentation, and multi-site control.
- Magento as a whole is reliable and can be made very fast thanks to built-in fullpage caching on Magento 2.
- Magento is scalable and can handle huge traffic, or it can be built for a small site.
- Small bugs and issues affecting performance could be handled more quickly, but the rate of bug fixes and improvements is much better now than it used to be!
- The built-in image lightbox uses an extension that is no longer supported. This could be improved.
- Extensions from "certified developers" are often buggy or extremely unreliable. A better certification process for third-party extensions could save a lot of time and stress for users.
September 19, 2017
Magento is a robust but complex e-commerce solution
We have implemented Magento CE as the e-commerce management solution for clients.
- Comes with APIs built-in
- Lots of extensibility and customizability
- Can handle a very large product catalog
- Magento is complicated to use and has a high learning curve from a management user point of view.
- We found it difficult to upgrade when newer releases came out.
- The front-end templating system seems needlessly obtuse and is difficult to develop. Smaller front-end elements are individual files and layouts are controlled through XML files.
July 18, 2017
Magento Community Edition Review
We use Magento as our eCommerce platform across our 4 sites. It is mostly used by the eCommerce team directly, however, we have trained brick and mortar employees to use simple functions custom made specifically for them to help with order fulfillment.
- Easy WYSIWYG editor
- Compatible with hundreds of platforms
- Pre-built extensions
- Security patching causes long term development downtime
- Not the quickest platform
Magento is the primary CMS used for e-commerce across the market for good reason. It's open source and built specifically for e-commerce, and the best part of this CMS is it's FREE! It's not as popular a CMS as WordPress, but WordPress isn't built specifically for e-commerce and is well know for it's security issues. It's a great place to start, and can scale with your business as you grow. The benefits of being able to start out for free and grow your online business are difficult to beat.
- As stated before, it's open source and it's free.
- Magento CE is scalable as you continue to grow your online business.
- It is high performance, and highly scalable.
- A key benefit to being open source is that there's a large community and plenty of developer support.
- If you have a large number of products, performance will degrade continually. 10-20 products is no problem but 20,000 or more and there's a noticeable slowdown.
- Your site will not load quickly with community edition.
- It's difficult to roll back changes if you make a modification by mistake. Backup/restore options are not great with CE.
We implement and provide support for Magento Community Edition for most of our clients. Most of our clients are needing a platform that offers products to buy and Magento meets those needs very well. It has a base setup from which you can build off of with modules and custom theming to provide the experience the clients need to present to their customers.
- Out of the box product display allows for you to quickly get your products shown to the consumers
- Customizable product options allow for a wide variety of selection of products
- Customizable payment and shipping options allow for many different use-case scenarios for the consumer.
- It is still using a lot of xml for it's configuration which can make things complicated.
- Updating has gotten better, but very specific requirements make it difficult at times.
- Very specific requirements for installing also make it difficult.
As a web developer, I use Magento CE for some of my clients. We build them a website using the CMS system. It is a very efficient system as it helps our clients quickly and cheaply get their product/service out there.
- It is a great solution for mid to large sized E-Commerce companies who want to quickly get their product to market
- It's cost effective as there are a number of extensions available extending the capabilities of the system.
- The websites created using Magento CE are responsive and ready to set up. Just upload a few products and modify some colors and you're good to go.
- One feature of Magento CE that I feel needs improvement is with the structure of the system. Many of the important SEO factors like minifying the CSS files don't work without causing some issues on the site. It does take someone skilled to get a site working properly. It's not built for the novice in mind.
September 25, 2014
Magento CE Solves SMB E-commerce Needs
We use Magento CE for our www.MageRevolution.com website. We also have done many installations for clients. Magento CE allows us to build robust, flexible, enterprise level e-commerce solutions are a much more affordable level than many comparable systems. We have clients with as many as 90,000 sku's and, if installed and tuned properly, Magento is capable of providing a rich shopping experience. In addition, there are so many resources available that a Magento store owner won't feel isolated or restricted by their developer or platform.
- Flexibility to add or enhance functionality as needed.
- Great assortment of inexpensive add-ons and designs, although care should be taken to insure compatibility and use.
- Low cost of entry relative to other robust systems.
- Despite its popularity, successful implementation requires not only an in-depth experience with Magento, but true knowledge of how e-commerce works. It is a complex platform with poor, Magento-provided documentation.
- Many — you could almost say "most" — of the add-ons created for Magento are not of great quality. There are plenty that are, but you have to be very careful.
- Designers may feel overwhelmed by the complex template structure.
Magento Open Source Scorecard Summary
Feature Scorecard Summary
About Magento Open Source
Magento is an open-source ecommerce content management solution originally developed by Varien Inc and presently supported by Adobe. The Magento Open Source version (formerly known as Community Edition) is for developers and tech-savvy merchants that is available as a free download, and is supported with free upgrades from the Magento Community. Because it is free and open-source, users will enjoy the ability to alter the code. This version still presents a fully capable eCommerce presence with multiple, mobile-accessible sites, SEO optimization, targeted promotions, the ability to alter themes and and change the layout, taxes and shipping management, and more.
Categories: Digital Experience, Ecommerce
Magento Open Source Integrations
Magento Open Source Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |