7 ms·

Magento is dead – Merchants want a suite of marketing tools, not refactored code

39 points by peterjaap 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago
Apparently spell-check is also a dead technology.
seivan 13y ago
The developer hostility in this is astounding.
- tokenizerrr 13y ago
  Yeah, seriously. The entitlement. My favorite was > automated SEO using artificial intelligence;
  - mariusmg 13y ago
    Most likely he meant generating page keywords/description using the product name and details. A very fancy way of putting it, but something very common sense from a business perspective.
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      But still, not something that should be baked into the core platform. Perhaps your idea of how it should work is different from a large portion of merchants. Why should one version or the other become a core part of the platform for every merchant. Even if the module providing a 'core' feature is written by Magento, it shouldn't be in the core project but should be treated just like any other 3rd party module. Ultimately you want a core platform that is rock solid and extensible. That's what a good integrator then build out either from the low-end of just adding and configuring OTS modules to the high-end of bespoke modules.
    - lowmagnet 13y ago
      If store A and B sell a product for the same price on all levels, I don't want a search turning up A because they did better SEO. I'd much rather they punish A for gaming the system. We shouldn't be encouraging this shit, and we be giving the SEO 'experts'[1] the cold shoulder. [1] About secret algorithms? Yeah, right.
- trapezor 13y ago
  Indeed, he should just shut up and program all of that himself and put the source code on github. He, without developers slowing him down he's probably finished in a week....
- Rantenki 13y ago
  Strongly agree that this is ludicrously hostile to devs. This statement here: "This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code." Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence". I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions. Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.
lsaferite 13y ago
While this article may be correct on a few points, the idea that Magento should bundle every feature under the sun is silly. That is what the module marketplace is meant to provide. And even some of the features tagged as missing ARE provided in the Enterprise Edition if you are inclined to pay for a license. I think the bigger issue with Magento 2.0 is the missed opportunity to use the backward compatibility breakage to clean out some of the horrible bits of home-grown code in Magento and replace them with 3rd party libraries. If anything, I think Magento should actually drop features from core and become a solid platform for others to build upon. EDIT: Speeling :)
c0n5pir4cy 13y ago
Every single little thing he mentioned shouldn't be in the core product. Magento is not an all in one marketing, shop and aftersale solution; it is an eCommerce platform. Anything above/beyond that should be a plugin/separate solution.
- lsaferite 13y ago
  I 100% agree with this. I honestly think Magento should basically drop almost every core 'feature' and just become a rock-solid platform to build upon.
  - al2o3cr 13y ago
    I'm not sure the developer ecosystem that Magento currently has would be responsive to that - I only worked with it a little, but it seemed like 75%+ of the "solutions" to issues people ran into were provided by other devs saying "well, if you pay $$$ for my FooBarBaz plugin that problem will go away".
    - lsaferite 13y ago
      I'm not sure what your point was. You described exactly what I was saying should happen. The core is just a platform to build upon and all the features you want are simply modules you add to the core. Now, if the modules you want are free or not is another story.
- ForHackernews 13y ago
  That's not the way the small businesses that use Magento think. They want one, all-singing all-dancing tool that does everything they could ever imagine wanting. And they never want to update it or maintain it or have to think about it.
  - mgkimsal 13y ago
    And they also want it to adapt to the changing needs of their business and the wider marketplace. Without upgrading, modifications, downtime, adjustments to how they work, or having to pay anything extra. Did I get close? :)
justincormack 13y ago
I havent looked at it recently, but the code used to be awful, which is perhaps where the rewrite comes in. But giant PHP applications with even more features are not really the future, these things need to be built as sets of APIs and libraries that you can put together to add the features you want (which are complex).
- James_Duval 13y ago
  It is indeed still awful. I know someone who works in Magento and they frequently come to me with genuine WTF bits of code. Added functionality would be a nightmare. A rewrite is sorely needed, and will help developers who have to work with and on Magento to save their bosses time and money.
Zyava 13y ago
Half of points aren't true, for some other there are extensions in Magento Connect...
username42 13y ago
Refactoring is something that has to be done before adding features. If you first start by adding features, ignoring the fact that the code needs refactoring, the code becomes impossible to maintain. Stopping development of new features during refactoring is also a good pratice. Obviously, the anti-practice is to refactor so often or to spend so much time refactoring that nothing useful is developed.
clark-kent 13y ago
These are features that an e-commerce SASS could build into their service, it obviously creates a huge mess adding such features into the core of a platform. Some of these features could also fit in a plugin but it really sounds like OP needs a SASS.
adnam 13y ago
My main problem with Magento was it's lack of an API to integrate with 3rd-party systems. Someone implementing a competitor should start with a decent API, and build the interface on top of that. If I had time and money, I would do this myself. Also the EAV database was horrible to deal with.
- conradfr 13y ago
  Each time I had to do a Magento (CE) site I fantasized about doing a concurrent platform. But I know better than to think one average dev like me can do that so instead I just vow to never work on a e-commerce site again. FWIW Magento or Prestashop can really make you a very decent e-commerce site quickly and cheaply. Hard to really complain when they offer free versions. But still, Magento can sometimes calculate VAT wrong (among other things) ! You would thought being an e-commerce platform it would at least not screw that.
- rch 13y ago
  Is it going to use a similar scheme after the rewrite?
  - adnam 13y ago
    It looks like EAV is staying https://github.com/magento/magento2/search?q=EAV https://github.com/magento/magento2/search?q=EAV
    - conradfr 13y ago
      The EAV problem has been mitigated with the indexes feature some years ago though.
tramov 13y ago
Magento's largest problem is that most people who look at it assume it is like Wordpress. Download, click install, change the theme somewhat and get started. Very unlike Wordpress this is hard. So you either shell out cash to outside developers (a healthy enough marketplace exists) or pay the price in learning how to program it yourself. Enough decent materials on how to do this exist but it is definitely not aimed at weekend programmers.
- aleachjr 13y ago
  I don't think anybody would disagree that Magento has a pretty healthy learning curve. Additionally, there are too many companies out in the world who are just looking for the cheapest developer that they can find. This combination creates a huge problem. I would venture to guess that most weekend PHP developers think that they are capable of developing in Magento. I mean, do you think you can take on any new PHP project and figure out how to make it work? While some may have skills to do such, it is the large marjority that do not have the drive, desire, or knowledge to do this the right way. In the end, it is this group of people who are giving others in the Community a bad name. They hack Mage code, lack even basic development skills, and leave projects in an even worse position than when they started. The Magento community can only do so much in education and help. Additionally, Magento recognized that this was a huge problem and started providing training with Magento U. While this may not be cost effective for every developer in the world, at least Magento has acknowledged that this need exists and continues to provide training and new programs on an ongoing basis. TLDR, Magento is complex, and complex systems are not meant for every developer in the world. Pick your developers wisely and they will not burn you with bad code. Magento representation in 26% of the market sure does not seem dead to me.
danielweber 13y ago
Anyone have a cache? EDIT: here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 and it is nothing more than a technical rewrite. Magento 2 offers the same feature set as Magento 1. You'll just need to pay a developer to migrate all your 1.x extensions to 2.x, since there is no upgrade path. But the community cost of everyone moving to Magento 2.0 ranges in the $USD 1 billion. This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code. A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant's needs. Magento is missing a most important suite of marketing and sales automation tools. Here is some features online merchants really dream about: built-in A/B testing; integrated social media ROI tracking (e.g. SumAll statistics); sales automation tools: abandoned cart reports, automated follow-up emails, automated payment reminders; consumer behavior profiling to live-target marketing efforts based on behavior; customer persona segmentation such as "single men / mothers with children / affluent customers", to increase marketing effectiveness; easy-to-use multi-site and multilingual installations (Magento is cumbersome); helpdesk ticketing system, built-in live chat; built-in onestepcheckout; automated SEO using artificial intelligence; scheduled product imports to update product prices, stock, images attributes - including the ability to create new products and disable out-of-stock products; automatic product categorization based on product description content; social ecommerce ("share this product" with product landing pages for Facebook/Twitter); clever discounts such as bundled product discounts: "buy A+B together, get 5% discount on B"; built-in product XML/CSV exports for ciao, kelkoo, thefind, google and so forth; built-in newsletter or at the very least built-in Mailchimp support (with automatic setup); None of the above features are going to be implemented in Magento 2.0. What is the incentive to move to Magento 2.0? There is none. Do merchants really need the latest gimmicky "html5" technology? Mercahnts need a suite of sales and marketing tools that help drive their business. So again, like before Magento, there is a huge market potential for ecommerce software that offers the right marketing tools. Magento is dead. But who will bridge the gap? Shopfiy? Wordpress Woocommerce? Drupal Commerce? Each of these new projects is gaining on Magento's lead. My prediction is that Magento 1.x adoption has peaked and Magento 2.x adoption will never happen. Instead, The People will switch to far more advanced alternatives. Advanced in terms of marketing that is, not jQuery.
ceejayoz 13y ago
> A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant's needs. Merchants don't need security, performance, and a more easily developable system for the developers they hire to build on?
- tokenizerrr 13y ago
  Of course not, it's just silly developers creating spaghetti code to keep themselves in business /s
TempleOSV2 13y ago
If it's not God's official temple, we all agree it's nothing. If it is God's official temple, it lasts longer than Linux or Windows. God says... vengeful Moses SupremerCourt IMHO One_finger_salute liberal honesty by_the_way act I_can't_believe_it repeat_after_me meek heaven Terry pardon_the_french youre_lucky delightful rose_colored_glasses I_love_you ROFLMAO over_the_top scorning I_don't_care don't_worry The_good_stuff chill depressing rubbish potentially fight you_never_know yada_yada_yada delicious strip joke wazz_up_with_that whiner umm_the_other_answer over_the_top astounding Catastrophic_Success funny hobnob who_are_you_to_judge tattle_tale Zap you_think_you_could_do_better you'll_see IMHO think_you_could_do_better later Zap mundo_stoked well_obviously
happywolf 13y ago
I have been using Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) for 6months on a production sites in Europe and US, with total revenue so far exceeds a few million dollars. The reason I mention this is to give everybody a context of my comment and background. I work for a large company, so the money doesn't go to me. To be fair, some of the features mentioned, for example abandoned cart reports, do exist in Magento EE. While some features like consumer profiling don't really belong to an eCommerce platform. Instead, those belong to CRM (consumer relationship management) tools. One of the reasons CRM is an independent system is a lot of shops have offline presence also, and lumping CRM features into eCommerce platform unnecessarily complicates things. There are extensions to sync between Magento and a few CRMs. My wish list for Magento: built-in A/B testing, and multiple campaign management.
debacle 13y ago
Magento has been poor software since Varien started trying to monetize. It has always been slower than necessary, a huge resource hog, and relatively complex to configure. The real problem is that there is nothing better out there. Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds. It's too bad, really. Five years ago I was really excited for Magento, but within months I realized that it would almost universally be cheaper (from a development standpoint) to write an eCommerce project from scratch than use Magento - it takes you 95% of the way there in a lot of ways, but that last 5% is critical.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- at-fates-hands 13y ago
  >>>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds. This a thousand times. I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke. Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.
  - benmarks 13y ago
    Let me know how bespoke commerce apps work out for you financially.
gesman 13y ago
From the developer's perspective Magento is a maze of spagetti nightmare. The cost to maintain it, adding custom extensions and keep it up and running as a whole is way, way more than using off the shelf SaaS ecommerce solution.
- weaksauce 13y ago
  Absolutely the worst maze of spaghetti files. To get anything done on one page you had to edit a few different deeply nested partial files. I hated working on it.
  - aeno 13y ago
    I assume you have never worked with xtCommerce... My first experience with eCommerce applications was xtC 3 and that thing really got me headaches...
    - weaksauce 13y ago
      At the time it was supposed to be the best eCommerce solution out there. Tried it and it was painfully slow to both develop for, to administer, and for the customer to use.

39 points by peterjaap 13y ago

coldcode 13y ago

Apparently spell-check is also a dead technology.

seivan 13y ago

The developer hostility in this is astounding.

tokenizerrr 13y ago
Yeah, seriously. The entitlement. My favorite was > automated SEO using artificial intelligence;
- mariusmg 13y ago
  Most likely he meant generating page keywords/description using the product name and details. A very fancy way of putting it, but something very common sense from a business perspective.
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    But still, not something that should be baked into the core platform. Perhaps your idea of how it should work is different from a large portion of merchants. Why should one version or the other become a core part of the platform for every merchant. Even if the module providing a 'core' feature is written by Magento, it shouldn't be in the core project but should be treated just like any other 3rd party module. Ultimately you want a core platform that is rock solid and extensible. That's what a good integrator then build out either from the low-end of just adding and configuring OTS modules to the high-end of bespoke modules.
  - lowmagnet 13y ago
    If store A and B sell a product for the same price on all levels, I don't want a search turning up A because they did better SEO. I'd much rather they punish A for gaming the system. We shouldn't be encouraging this shit, and we be giving the SEO 'experts'[1] the cold shoulder. [1] About secret algorithms? Yeah, right.
trapezor 13y ago
Indeed, he should just shut up and program all of that himself and put the source code on github. He, without developers slowing him down he's probably finished in a week....
Rantenki 13y ago
Strongly agree that this is ludicrously hostile to devs. This statement here: "This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code." Ummm, no. This is what happens when feature requirements are poorly communicated over a long period of time, combined with implementing every half baked or ill advised feature asked for by the marketing team. You know, stuff like "automated SEO using artificial intelligence". I have worked on Magento, and agree that it is painful and convoluted, but it's a bit hard to believe that every single dev that has contributed to it was either stupid and/or malicious. Hopefully, moving to a community driven approach on 2.0 will actually clean up some of the technical debt and make the product more reliable, although it's more likely that it's just going to result in future feature adds coming from more numerous stakeholders with conflicting visions. Hopefully the Magento management can manage all that input and stay focused. What they absolutely need to ignore is misguided and obviously clueless (or even malicious) feedback like this article.

lsaferite 13y ago

While this article may be correct on a few points, the idea that Magento should bundle every feature under the sun is silly. That is what the module marketplace is meant to provide. And even some of the features tagged as missing ARE provided in the Enterprise Edition if you are inclined to pay for a license. I think the bigger issue with Magento 2.0 is the missed opportunity to use the backward compatibility breakage to clean out some of the horrible bits of home-grown code in Magento and replace them with 3rd party libraries. If anything, I think Magento should actually drop features from core and become a solid platform for others to build upon. EDIT: Speeling :)

c0n5pir4cy 13y ago

Every single little thing he mentioned shouldn't be in the core product. Magento is not an all in one marketing, shop and aftersale solution; it is an eCommerce platform. Anything above/beyond that should be a plugin/separate solution.

lsaferite 13y ago
I 100% agree with this. I honestly think Magento should basically drop almost every core 'feature' and just become a rock-solid platform to build upon.
- al2o3cr 13y ago
  I'm not sure the developer ecosystem that Magento currently has would be responsive to that - I only worked with it a little, but it seemed like 75%+ of the "solutions" to issues people ran into were provided by other devs saying "well, if you pay $$$ for my FooBarBaz plugin that problem will go away".
  - lsaferite 13y ago
    I'm not sure what your point was. You described exactly what I was saying should happen. The core is just a platform to build upon and all the features you want are simply modules you add to the core. Now, if the modules you want are free or not is another story.
ForHackernews 13y ago
That's not the way the small businesses that use Magento think. They want one, all-singing all-dancing tool that does everything they could ever imagine wanting. And they never want to update it or maintain it or have to think about it.
- mgkimsal 13y ago
  And they also want it to adapt to the changing needs of their business and the wider marketplace. Without upgrading, modifications, downtime, adjustments to how they work, or having to pay anything extra. Did I get close? :)

justincormack 13y ago

I havent looked at it recently, but the code used to be awful, which is perhaps where the rewrite comes in. But giant PHP applications with even more features are not really the future, these things need to be built as sets of APIs and libraries that you can put together to add the features you want (which are complex).

James_Duval 13y ago
It is indeed still awful. I know someone who works in Magento and they frequently come to me with genuine WTF bits of code. Added functionality would be a nightmare. A rewrite is sorely needed, and will help developers who have to work with and on Magento to save their bosses time and money.

Zyava 13y ago

Half of points aren't true, for some other there are extensions in Magento Connect...

username42 13y ago

Refactoring is something that has to be done before adding features. If you first start by adding features, ignoring the fact that the code needs refactoring, the code becomes impossible to maintain. Stopping development of new features during refactoring is also a good pratice. Obviously, the anti-practice is to refactor so often or to spend so much time refactoring that nothing useful is developed.

clark-kent 13y ago

These are features that an e-commerce SASS could build into their service, it obviously creates a huge mess adding such features into the core of a platform. Some of these features could also fit in a plugin but it really sounds like OP needs a SASS.

adnam 13y ago

My main problem with Magento was it's lack of an API to integrate with 3rd-party systems. Someone implementing a competitor should start with a decent API, and build the interface on top of that. If I had time and money, I would do this myself. Also the EAV database was horrible to deal with.

conradfr 13y ago
Each time I had to do a Magento (CE) site I fantasized about doing a concurrent platform. But I know better than to think one average dev like me can do that so instead I just vow to never work on a e-commerce site again. FWIW Magento or Prestashop can really make you a very decent e-commerce site quickly and cheaply. Hard to really complain when they offer free versions. But still, Magento can sometimes calculate VAT wrong (among other things) ! You would thought being an e-commerce platform it would at least not screw that.
rch 13y ago
Is it going to use a similar scheme after the rewrite?
- adnam 13y ago
  It looks like EAV is staying https://github.com/magento/magento2/search?q=EAV https://github.com/magento/magento2/search?q=EAV
  - conradfr 13y ago
    The EAV problem has been mitigated with the indexes feature some years ago though.

tramov 13y ago

Magento's largest problem is that most people who look at it assume it is like Wordpress. Download, click install, change the theme somewhat and get started. Very unlike Wordpress this is hard. So you either shell out cash to outside developers (a healthy enough marketplace exists) or pay the price in learning how to program it yourself. Enough decent materials on how to do this exist but it is definitely not aimed at weekend programmers.

aleachjr 13y ago
I don't think anybody would disagree that Magento has a pretty healthy learning curve. Additionally, there are too many companies out in the world who are just looking for the cheapest developer that they can find. This combination creates a huge problem. I would venture to guess that most weekend PHP developers think that they are capable of developing in Magento. I mean, do you think you can take on any new PHP project and figure out how to make it work? While some may have skills to do such, it is the large marjority that do not have the drive, desire, or knowledge to do this the right way. In the end, it is this group of people who are giving others in the Community a bad name. They hack Mage code, lack even basic development skills, and leave projects in an even worse position than when they started. The Magento community can only do so much in education and help. Additionally, Magento recognized that this was a huge problem and started providing training with Magento U. While this may not be cost effective for every developer in the world, at least Magento has acknowledged that this need exists and continues to provide training and new programs on an ongoing basis. TLDR, Magento is complex, and complex systems are not meant for every developer in the world. Pick your developers wisely and they will not burn you with bad code. Magento representation in 26% of the market sure does not seem dead to me.

danielweber 13y ago

Anyone have a cache? EDIT: here it is. No infringement intended. Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up. So now what? Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 and it is nothing more than a technical rewrite. Magento 2 offers the same feature set as Magento 1. You'll just need to pay a developer to migrate all your 1.x extensions to 2.x, since there is no upgrade path. But the community cost of everyone moving to Magento 2.0 ranges in the $USD 1 billion. This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code. A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant's needs. Magento is missing a most important suite of marketing and sales automation tools. Here is some features online merchants really dream about: built-in A/B testing; integrated social media ROI tracking (e.g. SumAll statistics); sales automation tools: abandoned cart reports, automated follow-up emails, automated payment reminders; consumer behavior profiling to live-target marketing efforts based on behavior; customer persona segmentation such as "single men / mothers with children / affluent customers", to increase marketing effectiveness; easy-to-use multi-site and multilingual installations (Magento is cumbersome); helpdesk ticketing system, built-in live chat; built-in onestepcheckout; automated SEO using artificial intelligence; scheduled product imports to update product prices, stock, images attributes - including the ability to create new products and disable out-of-stock products; automatic product categorization based on product description content; social ecommerce ("share this product" with product landing pages for Facebook/Twitter); clever discounts such as bundled product discounts: "buy A+B together, get 5% discount on B"; built-in product XML/CSV exports for ciao, kelkoo, thefind, google and so forth; built-in newsletter or at the very least built-in Mailchimp support (with automatic setup); None of the above features are going to be implemented in Magento 2.0. What is the incentive to move to Magento 2.0? There is none. Do merchants really need the latest gimmicky "html5" technology? Mercahnts need a suite of sales and marketing tools that help drive their business. So again, like before Magento, there is a huge market potential for ecommerce software that offers the right marketing tools. Magento is dead. But who will bridge the gap? Shopfiy? Wordpress Woocommerce? Drupal Commerce? Each of these new projects is gaining on Magento's lead. My prediction is that Magento 1.x adoption has peaked and Magento 2.x adoption will never happen. Instead, The People will switch to far more advanced alternatives. Advanced in terms of marketing that is, not jQuery.

ceejayoz 13y ago

> A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant's needs. Merchants don't need security, performance, and a more easily developable system for the developers they hire to build on?

tokenizerrr 13y ago
Of course not, it's just silly developers creating spaghetti code to keep themselves in business /s

TempleOSV2 13y ago

If it's not God's official temple, we all agree it's nothing. If it is God's official temple, it lasts longer than Linux or Windows. God says... vengeful Moses SupremerCourt IMHO One_finger_salute liberal honesty by_the_way act I_can't_believe_it repeat_after_me meek heaven Terry pardon_the_french youre_lucky delightful rose_colored_glasses I_love_you ROFLMAO over_the_top scorning I_don't_care don't_worry The_good_stuff chill depressing rubbish potentially fight you_never_know yada_yada_yada delicious strip joke wazz_up_with_that whiner umm_the_other_answer over_the_top astounding Catastrophic_Success funny hobnob who_are_you_to_judge tattle_tale Zap you_think_you_could_do_better you'll_see IMHO think_you_could_do_better later Zap mundo_stoked well_obviously

happywolf 13y ago

I have been using Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) for 6months on a production sites in Europe and US, with total revenue so far exceeds a few million dollars. The reason I mention this is to give everybody a context of my comment and background. I work for a large company, so the money doesn't go to me. To be fair, some of the features mentioned, for example abandoned cart reports, do exist in Magento EE. While some features like consumer profiling don't really belong to an eCommerce platform. Instead, those belong to CRM (consumer relationship management) tools. One of the reasons CRM is an independent system is a lot of shops have offline presence also, and lumping CRM features into eCommerce platform unnecessarily complicates things. There are extensions to sync between Magento and a few CRMs. My wish list for Magento: built-in A/B testing, and multiple campaign management.

debacle 13y ago

Magento has been poor software since Varien started trying to monetize. It has always been slower than necessary, a huge resource hog, and relatively complex to configure. The real problem is that there is nothing better out there. Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds. It's too bad, really. Five years ago I was really excited for Magento, but within months I realized that it would almost universally be cheaper (from a development standpoint) to write an eCommerce project from scratch than use Magento - it takes you 95% of the way there in a lot of ways, but that last 5% is critical.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
at-fates-hands 13y ago
>>>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds. This a thousand times. I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke. Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.
- benmarks 13y ago
  Let me know how bespoke commerce apps work out for you financially.

gesman 13y ago

From the developer's perspective Magento is a maze of spagetti nightmare. The cost to maintain it, adding custom extensions and keep it up and running as a whole is way, way more than using off the shelf SaaS ecommerce solution.

weaksauce 13y ago
Absolutely the worst maze of spaghetti files. To get anything done on one page you had to edit a few different deeply nested partial files. I hated working on it.
- aeno 13y ago
  I assume you have never worked with xtCommerce... My first experience with eCommerce applications was xtC 3 and that thing really got me headaches...
  - weaksauce 13y ago
    At the time it was supposed to be the best eCommerce solution out there. Tried it and it was painfully slow to both develop for, to administer, and for the customer to use.