Apparently Open Source means lower publishing standards. Be prepare to hire a software developer.
November 30, 2018
Apparently Open Source means lower publishing standards. Be prepare to hire a software developer.
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Magento Open Source
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.
- 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, when fully "plugged-in" required server resources which drowned our host. We hit a wall with growth due to these resources and researched redevelopment on Woo or migration to a new platform. We chose the latter.
Shopify and BigCommerce were limited to their closed ecosystems and would not have given us the open avenue to grow in the directions we were looking for.
Shopify and BigCommerce were limited to their closed ecosystems and would not have given us the open avenue to grow in the directions we were looking for.