Magento eCommerce Platform Review - Top 10 Features I Love
Posted December 26, 2008
I have been using Magento for quite a while now. I have over 30,000 products and several stores online. I am a huge fan of open source solutions because of the active communities, forums and ongoing improvements, not to mention the software is free.
I used Joomla & Virturemart prior to switching to Magento. I like Joomla very much and have several Joomla sites running too. If you need lots of unique functionality and run more of a general purpose website, its’ great, offering hundreds of cool plugins. However, I have found through much trial and error that Magento meets my particular needs much better focusing more on straight ecommerce.
The Magento install is simple, taking me about 15 minutes for a new magento database and only about 3 minutes to add an additional site to an existing database.
The backend administration is easy to get the hang of and has a very good interface. Here are some of my favorite features that I could not live without:
1. FREE!!! Ok, this one was obvious. You do have to pay for support if you want to, it’s expensive. But I haven’t had to yet - the free forum has answered all my questions.
2. Multi-site functionality. I love this feature. Creating additional websites on their own unique domain is awesome. Each website can have a unique store. Each website may have it’s own template as well. You’d never know my sites were all running on the same install of Magento.
3. Ability to import huge spreadsheets of product. I couldn’t live without this, very important for my business.
4. Searching and sorting of product by several criteria.
5. SEO functionality is built-in, tags, descriptions, very clean urls, site navigation and clean html.
6. Integrated Google analytics - I live by my stats and tracking - very important feature!
7. Builtin functionality for all the major merchant accounts.
8. Newsletter
9. No limits on number of product or purchases - this is one of the reasons I don’t use store software like Yahoo Stores or other similar services. I hate paying monthly payments while my stores are ramping up.
10. Integrated sales and store tracking - not sure what to call this feature.. it’s not really a feature but more of a overall magento architecture. Because all my stores are installed into one single database, all my sales and customers are managed from a single page. This saves me a ton of time, placing orders and managing sales.
11. Ok this is more than 10 but the as of the most recent version of Magento 1.2.0.2 there are a couple more way cool features: Google base formatting & support for downloadable products - very nice.
Ok you can tell I love this software. It’s making me money and I love it so I don’t have a lot of bad things to say about it. But just to be as impartial as possible, here are some of the bumps I’ve run into:
1. When you install magento you copy all the files up to your host and then have to change the permissions on some of the directories to get the install to complete. It took me about 5 minutes of searching on the forum for a solution but still, I had to search for a solution and the install didn’t work for me out of the box. It was a very simple fix and after that the install worked like a dream. This may have been fixed since they’ve gone through a few revs since I first installed.
2. I found that while it’s possible to import products through a spreadsheet, it is not possible to dynamically create categories for those products from the spreadsheet. So you have to first create your categories then do the import. I did find a very simple file from the magento site that you can copy to your server and fix the problem. This functionality should be built in, I’m sure they will add it in a future release if they haven’t already.
3. I found that an import won’t create custom attributes from a spreadsheet. So if I blow away my products for some reason and re-import I have to input the custom attribute values all over again. This hasn’t been a huge problem for me because I don’t use custom attributes that much.
4. After my first install I noticed some of the backend admin menus wouldn’t work. Again I found a quick solution on the forum - basically had to change permissions on a particular file.
Well that’s it… really…. I haven’t had that many problems with this shopping cart. It’s really quite robust from what I’ve found.
The only thing I would add to the bad list is that there aren’t that many templates out there. Calling all graphic artists!! Hint, hint…. this is a huge opportunity for you guys. Take a look at how many downloads there have been of magento - there’s a huge biz opp for you guys.
Joomla has a ton of templates, I wish magento had the same but it’s a newer product and there’s a little lag time for the template sites to start coming online. I don’t suggest paying premium for a single template unless your site is making some money first. I like the template clubs that charge about $60 - $100 per year for monthly templates. I don’t have a problem using templates that others are using we all are in different markets so it’s not that big of a deal.
Anyway, I’ll be posting a lot of awesome magento how to’s that will really help you out. Add a link to my blog on your favorite social networking site below or subscribe to my rss feed to stay on top of all my posts.
Have a great day!
Corby
http://ecommlab.com/10/magento-ecommerce-platform-review-top-10-features-i-love/
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