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View Full Version : Any experience with Magneto



ravenrose
10-27-2009, 02:43 PM
Do you guys have any experience with Magneto ecommerce software? I did check it out and it includes many features that I look in a shopping cart software. I have experimented with Zen Cart and Cube Cart, they're okay but not cutting edge. Of course, I don't want it look obviously off the shelf and use my own template that I already developed and designed. I'd like to integrate my own designs onto any off the shelf ecommerce software but Magneto comes out most popular because it also includes the future of m-commerce and the Vzoom feature. Were you able to design the template using your own?

vangogh
10-27-2009, 02:57 PM
I've been helping a friend with a Magento site recently and I absolutely hate it. Everything seems to be more complicated than it should be and it seems to me that you need to really be an expert with web development in order to make even a simple change to anything. That's fine for me, but I can't imagine the average person ever being able to work with it.

For example my friend needed to change the price of a few things in the cart. Sounds simple enough. We log into the backend, find the products, change the prices, and save. The new prices are reflected on the admin side. If we go back into the product the new price is there. However on the outside where it matters most the price still shows the same as it always did. The fact that we have to do anything more than update the price on the backend to get it to show on the frontend is ridiculous.

The price thing is just one of many similar problems we've encountered.

Magento pages load veeeeerrrrrry slow even though it's caching dynamic pages and serving them as static pages. Some searching indicates to run Magento you need to find a web host with servers configured specifically for Magento and naturally at a higher cost.

There is virtually zero support. Magento's business model is to sell you support, which is fine, but they don't respond at all to support threads on their forum and you even have to buy the basic documentation. It strikes me that they have no incentive to make Magento easy to work with since they want you to buy their support.

A few times here I've recommended Magento based on things I've heard. Now that I've finally had a chance to use it, I'll never recommend it again. I can't find one thing I like about it and actually prefer either osCommerce or ZenCart, which says a lot.

As for my friend we've convinced the site owner to let me give him a new WordPress site and I'm going to dig into shopping cart plugins for WordPress.

If it means anything every time I've worked on the site I inevitably end up typing the query "magento sucks" into a search engine.

KristineS
10-27-2009, 05:02 PM
We looked at it a couple of years ago, but we found it to be buggy and the documentation wasn't very helpful. I haven't seen it or had any interaction with it since then, so it might be better now. At the time we decided to move on and tried something else.

vangogh
10-27-2009, 06:27 PM
Based on what I've seen the last few weeks, I'd say it's not any better. I really wonder now why I've seen so many people recommending it.

Dan Furman
10-27-2009, 07:25 PM
Magneto is bad. Brotherhood of evil mutants and all...

TulsaWeb
12-27-2009, 12:38 PM
Hi Forum,

I'm going to go against the grain here and say that Magento is a powerful ecomm package, but it's immature. It has lots of features, with all of them hard to configure. I built a Magento store and totally re-built the front end, but it wasn't the easiest thing I've ever done, believe me. Configuring Magento is taking a big bite.

Vangogh is right in that things aren't as streamlined as they could be. A person has to change a price, then update the system cache to make the changes show in the site. Oh my aching back.

The basic package is so comprehensive that plugins are almost meaningless. It covers printing shipping labels and hooking to package tracking, it covers user tracking, wishlists for social networking, you name it. I would have rather had a basic package with lots of addons that I could configure separately and as needed. Too much complexity up front.

Sometimes I think the developers have made it complex to sell their services, but I may be wrong...

vangogh
12-28-2009, 11:09 AM
A person has to change a price, then update the system cache to make the changes show in the site.

That was one of the experiences I had with it. However even that never worked to change the price. We were able to get it to show on the admin side, but never on the frontend even after clearing the cache. And the price was always the old price as far as the system was concerned. Even had the clearing the cache worked it still seems to complicated to me for the average site owner. I have no doubt I could have made it work, but all that should have needed to be done was a simple change on the admin side.

Your average store owner should not have to jump through hoops to make a simple change.

In working with other shopping carts I can see that Magento does have a lot of nice features and maybe somewhere down the line it would be something I could recommend. As it is now the difficulty in doing simple things as well as the need for special hosting will keep me from recommending it to clients.


Sometimes I think the developers have made it complex to sell their services, but I may be wrong...

I don't think you're wrong. Their business model is to sell support. They even sell the documentation and provide next to nothing to help people get things set up. There's nothing wrong with selling support or even documentation, but a certain amount of both should be available. Unfortunately their business model gives them no incentive to offer either.

orion_joel
12-29-2009, 04:09 AM
I tried Magneto, thought i would see what it could offer up against the other free ones. The features were never a question, would do everything i wanted.

Which was fine if i did not have to spend hours and hours working out how to do just about anything more then the basics.

vangogh
12-29-2009, 11:47 AM
That was my issue too. It seemed way to complicated to do even the basic stuff. Like I said above, I wasn't concerned that I'd be able to figure out how to do things if I spent the time learning how, but I don't think the average site owner would be spending that time.

I can accept that it would take time to make development changes, but basic price changes should be as simple as logging in and changing the value in a form field. Requiring anything beyond that is not user friendly.

All the features in the world are meaningless if your users can't figure out how to use them. It doesn't help that there is no documentation either.

MrGamma
01-09-2010, 12:11 AM
I've been helping a friend with a Magento site recently and I absolutely hate it. Everything seems to be more complicated than it should be and it seems to me that you need to really be an expert with web development in order to make even a simple change to anything.

+1

I haven't really worked my way into the software, but it appears to be heavily over engineered. It seems to be the general consensus on the web that it is not to be messed around with under the hood. To make matters worse, I have stumbled across a few people who have reported some serious security breaches. Most people are falling back to much more proven and reliable cart systems.

vangogh
01-10-2010, 12:44 PM
I hadn't heard about the security breaches, but it definitely was difficult to work with. It's one thing if the only people working on the site would be web developers. It's another for the average site owner to have to deal with making any changes.

It did seem over engineered to me. There's also little to no documentation to help.