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.
—
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!
Related Posts
- Hacking Magento : a peek at various common security vulnerabilities and whether Magento is subject to them
- Jamin-Puech : a Magento-based web site I worked on
- Seul avec l’Open Source [fr] : why open source is only half the solution, and why your own efforts will make a difference
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.