While Magento continues to build a loyal following, we here at Elias think that it has just scratched the surface. We have worked with a number of early adopters who want a great online ecommerce management system, but larger enterprise clients have yet to join the movement. This got our team thinking about why the clients we talk to selected Magento. Here is what one of them told us:
When we decided to do a new implementation of the site, we wanted to find an open-source cart system that we could modify we didn’t expect our needs to be met entirely by any existing system. Our existing site uses an extensively modified OSCommerce installation and we are not at all happy with it and wanted to start over on a better platform. We chose Magento because it is powerful out of the box, flexible, well engineered, and built on a code framework (Zend) that is also actively developed. Also, it’s been developed and supported by a company, and not just a couple of unrelated developers. It has some downsides as well, but overall it looks like a good platform to build upon.
What about you? We would love to hear why you are working with Magento or what concerns you have about the platform.
I think from a clients point of view Magento has a lot to offer and as your client states being back by a commercial organisation is a big plus and will give the project stability and direction over open source solutions that aren’t.
The feature set is great and the admin interface easy to use and provides good, if basic, CRM features.
From a developers point of view Magento is, in my opinion, overly complex to develop and there is a distinct lack of documentation available – even to partners. I hope that the latter will improve over time.
Finally I think the support contracts need addressing, particularly requiring partners to get their clients to purchase them directly from Varien – which just doesn’t make sense to me. Clients want to deal with me, and I as a partner should be able to purchase Varien support as and when I need it.
Overall I think its a great project, and we are firmly behind it. Our clients love it, even if the developers don’t! (yet)…
Great points, Mark. And I agree, from a development perspective there’s much more work to be done, but at least the framework is sound — so I think we’re just seeing Magento come out of it’s infancy and in the near future will continue to see significant improvements to the project. It’s important to note that even in it’s current state, it blows other eCommerce solutions out of the water!
Eric, yes good point – it certainly blows other solutions out the water!