Prepare your pockets: fitting your needs is VERY expensive
April 02, 2018

Prepare your pockets: fitting your needs is VERY expensive

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Other

Overall Satisfaction with Magento

We used Magento CE 1.9 for our eCommerce company. We have over 15,000 products and sell mostly on the internet.
We had two softwares, one for selling (ecommerce, in this case, Magento) and another for internal stock management and logistics. That software connected to Magento to publish the products and manage stock levels.
Magento was used by most departments (sales, customer service, marketing), but as we are a small startup, communication is fluid in case somebody can't achieve what they're trying to do.
  • Magento is excellent at scalability. You can have 20,000 products and performance is not an issue at all. It can manage a lot of sales, customers, etc. without problems. I think the database and software is extremely optimized for scaling.
  • Exporting data is excellent too. With the proper extensions, you can export your catalog very easily and with a lot of information.
  • Filtering is reasonably quick, considering the amount of products we have.
  • Coupons and promotions are VERY good. You can easily create a discout for 5,000 products in a blink.
  • Magento is A HUGE PAIN to modify. Compared to alternatives (like WooCommerce) it is very hard to change things. Mostly because of how it's built with the Zend Framework and 20,000 files. If you would like to change a comma, good luck. It's going to take a whole day. The waterfall model on the theme helps, but it's very, very hard to change behaviors on the platform.
  • Developer community is very small compared to alternatives (again, WooCommerce). There aren't that many plugins, devs, and in general a community to ask for help. It's expensive and plugins (which are called extensions) are not very well maintained. Also, templates are hard to find. You have Ultimo (we used that and support is great) but besides that, there's not that much.
  • Updating Magento is SO painful. You never know what will happen. Expect anything.
  • Creating static content is hard to manage. At least I couldn't find any plugin for easily managing banners or blog pages.
  • The interface is so old and overwhelming at the same time. There are SO many options, but it's hard to find what you want. At least for me, it wasn't comfortable. You can get used to it, but it wasn't great.
  • The API was not that easy to manage. We had some troubles connecting with it.
  • Trying to debug an error is impossible. Good luck finding documentation on Stack Overflow.
  • We were able to have an eCommerce store running without a lot of perfomance issues and scalable. That was good. On the other hand...
  • We were unable to modify it to fit our needs. The checkout by default is awful (6 steps!!! Who the hell does CRO on Magento team?). Design and usability was good, but we improved our conversion rate by 200% by switching to another platform which we could easily modify.
Magento:
  • Scalable
  • Expensive to maintain and modify
  • Inflexible and hard to manage
  • Eats servers (maybe we did something wrong there, but that was our experience)
WooCommerce:
  • HUGE community
  • Lots of free plugins (SEO, optimization, referrals, coupons)
  • Lots of developers and themes
  • Lots of performance-optimized and cheap hostings
  • Hard to scale (but possible, we did it).
It would be my choice by far.

Shopify:
For what we needed (more than 15,000 products), it wasn't the best choice. But if I didn't know much about software and need to go to market very quickly, I would go with this.

PrestaShop is the poor brother of WooCommerce. I wouldn't go with it because it's similar but worse, with a smaller community and less plugins.

I would recomment Magento for someone who needs a store for multiple countries very quickly, who will manage lots of stock and who will have huge pockets for buying services (design, modifications, etc.) and plugins. You'll need them.

Besides that, I wouldn't recommend it. It eats servers, it's hard to maintain, hard to start with, hard to modify... there are many sweet alternatives if you don't want to be a HUGE megastore. WooCommerce, Shopify... even PrestaShop (which I tried a couple years ago and didn't like much) seems better suited.

Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
8
Product management
8
Bulk product upload
3
Branding
3
Mobile storefront
2
Product variations
7
Website integration
4
Visual customization
2
CMS
1
Abandoned cart recovery
2
Checkout user experience
3
eCommerce security
4
Promotions & discounts
10
Personalized recommendations
4
SEO
6
Multi-site management
8
Order processing
8
Inventory management
8
Shipping
Not Rated
Custom functionality
2