The best platform for large-scale e-commerce but maybe not the best for hobbyist or startups.
April 30, 2018
The best platform for large-scale e-commerce but maybe not the best for hobbyist or startups.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Magento Community Edition
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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
- 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.
Magento is definitely built for developers by developers and in my opinion is best suited for large-scale e-commerce stores. When you need to create a large store or require advance customization Magento is really the only way to go. We have tried using platforms like WooCommerce for large-scale websites and there always seems to be issues after a certain point. For example, we had a client years ago who came to us when they were just a small e-commerce store. Over time they built their business into a 5000 order a month company. It seemed after a certain point commerce could no longer handle the traffic and when we needed subscription-based models there was no suitable plug-in to accomplish this need in the WordPress repository. We have also dealt with ZenCart, OpenCart, and Shopify but we really only recommend these platforms to hobbyists.
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