Magento - the developer's choice in e-commerce platforms
Overall Satisfaction with Magento Open Source (formerly Community Edition)
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.
Pros
- 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.
Cons
- 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.
- 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.
Magento is hands down better than any hosted platform (i.e., BC), but only if you have a good development team. Hosted platforms are very limiting as to what you can accomplish "outside the box." Magento is much better than WooCommerce in its user friendliness and its feature set.
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