Magento Commerce Pros and Cons
October 01, 2018

Magento Commerce Pros and Cons

Jeff McRitchie | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Magento Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Magento

Magento offers a great flexibility and power for mid sized retailers who want to create a high quality online experience for their users. Although the platform requires a fair amount of technical expertise to set up, maintain and host the access to the source code and the ability to customize virtually any aspect of the platform means that virtually anything is possible when using Magento.
  • Highly flexible with open source code make expanding capabilities and customizing experiences virtually limitless
  • Huge community of developers and extensions to solve problems and provide support
  • Great set of out of the box features that provide a foundation for a best in class web experience
  • The platform is difficult to tune and can be slow. Even with expensive best in class hardware the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences.
  • The total cost of ownership for the platform can be quite high as a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform. The costs of initial development are only a down payment on what a Magento store will cost. For mid size companies with substantial web revenues this can be overcome for smaller businesses the total cost of ownership may be prohibitive.
  • Security of the platform can be an issue. Magento is often targeted by hackers and much of the security is the responsibility of the store owner.
  • Great for SEO. We have been able to build out a huge number of highly targeted pages on the site that have propelled our SEO to the next level
  • Magento plugs in with many third party tools including ERP's, CRM's, shipping tools. It is a core part of our tech stacks and has allowed us to improve our capabilities as a business.
  • Has enabled us to provide a best in class web experience for our customers. We are constantly expanding the capabilities of Magento and to improve sales and grow our business.
Magento is a great mid market product. It give you the ability to customize and can handle more complex business needs than both Shopify and BigCommerce. The ability to host the platform yourself and have full access to the source code allows for larger more complex catalogs, custom integrations and provides the ability to scale. When compared to SAP Hybris and Oracle ATG the cost is substantially lower both for development, maintenance and licensing costs.
If you have complex requirements, need flexibility and like having control and access to the code base Magento can be an awesome choice. If you are on a limited budget, are not a developer or can't hire a developer or if you can live with the out of the box features from a smaller SAS platform Magento may not be a great fit.

Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) Feature Ratings

Product catalog & listings
9
Product management
9
Bulk product upload
5
Branding
8
Mobile storefront
6
Product variations
8
Website integration
9
Visual customization
9
CMS
6
Checkout user experience
9
eCommerce security
6
Promotions & discounts
8
SEO
10
Multi-site management
8
Order processing
8
Inventory management
4
Shipping
4
Custom functionality
10

Evaluating Magento and Competitors

Yes - We had a legacy web platform before moving to Magento. The legacy platform was custom developed and we had to recreate many of the features inside of Magento. We were able to duplicate all of the required features and expand them substantially. Magento is easier to develop for and far more powerful.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Third-party Reviews
When we were looking for a new platform we were primarily concerned about finding something that would provide us with the features and functionality to grow our business moving forward. We needed to replace a number of custom features that we had built and wanted to make sure we wouldn't get trapped moving forward without the ability to expand and grow.
Overall I am happy with the decision but it would have been good to learn more about what would be required to maintain the platform moving forward during the development phase. I also wish I would have asked more questions about performance and speed for the platform and the things that we could do to make it faster