If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the e-Commerce universe the last few months, you’ve heard about Magento. It’s easy to find resources online explaining in great detail why Varien is a metaphorical messiah and Magento is the second coming and you should start using it right now.
I’m not saying that « Magento sucks. » There are plenty of good reasons for using Magento. It’s reliable, backed by an active community and used by many people. There are also bad reasons for choosing it, and if you don’t know better, you will end up being disappointed.
Here are the five bad reasons I hear the most:
1. Magento is « fully customizable » by dummies
Magento is as customizable as any other open source solution : you can code away any issues you have. If you can code, that is. Sure, there’s a fair amount of customization you can achieve without ever leaving the Magento back-office (sometimes at the cost of learning XML), but unless you learn how to code or spend money on it, you can easily reach a hard limit. Don’t choose Magento because you think you’ll be able to do anything you want.
The best way to use Magento is still to pay for someone to customize it for you, and stick to the basic functionality.
2. Magento is a complete e-Commerce package
Magento is just a piece of software. This means that, once installed, you will need to do the marketing yourself, which is hard if you’re not used to internet marketing and don’t have an existing high-traffic web site to rely on. You will have to host your web site (and make backups). And will have to do any administrative tasks related to storing user information too, such as registering with government agencies.
If you don’t want to do any of that, try looking at Selling on Amazon instead.
3. Magento has been used by [large corporation]
The large corporation does not succeed because it used Magento. It succeeds because it can spend money and hire talent to leverage Magento appropriately. There’s work involved in creating a successful e-Commerce site, so make sure you can take whatever steps are necessary to create one with your tool.
Besides, almost every tool has been used by a corporation or another, including homebrew solutions like Amazon’s Obidos. To say that something has been used by a large corporation only means it’s somewhat useful, not necessarily that it’s the best thing around.
4. Magento is free
Oh, please. Magento is cheap, but certainly not free. Even assuming that you have the skills to set up and customize Magento on your own, doing so still takes time. Plus, you need hosting, accounting, logistics, shipping. And selling stuff online involves more work than just plugging products into a web site and waiting for customers to come! Setting up an e-Commerce operation is an investment, no matter how you look at it.
Or, as Jason Cohen has phrased it quite admirably:
Open-source is free like puppies are free. You don’t write a check to get it, but you have to support it for life. Your employee’s time is not free. Working around bugs is not free. Having nothing but the Web of Lies Internet to rely on for tech support is not free.
5. Magento is a complete, standalone product
This sounds like a good idea in theory — a completely standalone solution that can be used by everyone and handles everything: buying, storing, marketing, advertising, selling, invoicing, shipping… until you need to make it talk to other software. If you’re not lucky enough to use a big-name piece of software that has Magento connectors available, the application that handles your inventory or your accounting or your web site will not be connected to your e-Commerce web site.
So, you will either have to pay for a connector to be written, or copy over all the data by hand.
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Did you choose Magento for a bad reason? Or did you ever give up on Magento for a bad reason only to find out later that you should have stayed the course? Make sure you mention it in the comments!
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Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
This is just one of the best articles i have ever seen related to eCommerce business.
It does help with the Magento Aspect to it as well.
Excellent job.
I am a Programmer, my company is now thinking of getting magento, I have to say I think after they do they will no longer need me to do any programming. Are my fears ridiculous?, I mean the way it looks, it seems magento does everything. Is my line of thinking correct?
Jeff – hell no! More likely the exact opposite. Magento catchphrase = “Making the difficult easy and the easy damn near impossible”. Excellent article. I wish all of my small business customers would read it (and learn).
n00b testifies:
I paid a company to build me a wizbang modern webstore. they suggested miva or magento. i went with magento bc of the open source, the nice graphics on their site and the feature list. It’s now been 14 mos live and it has settled down to a working system, but the early months were a complete living hell getting even the smallest things fixed. It was one of the worst business decisions in 25 yrs, (for several reasons mostly surrounding the _plan_, not so much that i chose magento), but the Magento beast is not a trivial matter.
Magento is complex, abstract, powerful and has many serious bugs that rise up and stop you in your tracks until you find a very skilled php doctor to fix the problem. online support is sketchy, great community, but very few real gurus are available for personal attention. (not complaining, i am in awe and in debt to the many fine experts who have taken their time to post online) it’s just that there are so many possible bugs that haven’t been posted and solved. Not to forget the bugs in your head, magento documentation is poor.
In hindsight i think the biggest thing to realize is that a professional venture on the web is its own animal, and if you dont have a good $50K minimum, and use that 50K very carefully, (this doesnt include planning and content creation time) you will end up pissing away a lot of time and money and seeing zero return. I only spent 20K between the original firm and subsequent contractors (probably the worst aspect of the venture, good coders are busy and arent interested in small problems, the one’s you pick up on the freelance boards are about 100% unethical hacks in my experience. they are anonymous and a world away from you and you are absolutely going to get screwed no matter how hard you try to avoid it, cuz theyre unethical hacks. (sure would love to drop some names here, you know who you are:)
That said, I’ve managed to learn an incredible amount of valuable skills due to this problem. I have learned even more about how to manage it wrong and now have a better idea of how to do it right. I call it a net win for me! So if you want a good school of good and hard knocks, i highly recommend Magento!
Jeff, I’m a programmer and I can tell you from experience that Magento creates a ton of opportunities and work. Upgrades often don’t go off without a hitch, and it’s very difficult to write custom modules, or even just maintain the proper directory permissions in Magento. If anything, Magento has opened a whole world of prosperity to my organization…and I hope it does for yours too. As far finding bad reasons to use Magento, there are many people who do. If you are not a developer, or don’t employ one, then DO NOT use Magento.
Tucson Web Developer and others with experience and knowledge of Magento , I am in search of clarification on all things Magento, I came across your post this morning. I am literally hours away from going with Magento and paying my deposit to local web developers. I am a small business owner venturing into an unknown territory of e-commerce. I am based in Australia. I am not a coder. I am happy to engage developers, but I have quite a small budget. With this said, I’m looking for either reassurance that my choice in Magento is the right one, or for advice to steer clear of Magento rather going with another much easier to use OS platform. Would really appreciate your thoughts. Regards