# Magento - Open Source Ecommerce



## rejoice (Jun 7, 2007)

Ok so I am guilty of not using it myself because I was waiting and waiting and now that I am already committed to my website, Magento, an email list I signed up for a while ago pops up.

From the looks of things it is the bees knees of any open source e-commerce platform in the sense of usability for web developers (the one's that are the CEO, marketing guy, PR guy, production, etc...) who don't have time to learn html and source codes and this and that.

I'm sure I could write a thing or 2 more but by the looks of things, I'm excited. I thought I'll post the link so we can all have a play around and share our thoughts on Magento - Home - Open Source eCommerce Evolved for us forumites and if it will stand up to any other e-commerce platform people are using.


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## TheWill (Oct 4, 2006)

It look promising, thanks for the link. I may use it in the coming month; if so, I'll post my findings.


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## Ross B (Apr 28, 2006)

Nice alert, Rejoice - thanks for that. Sure looks interesting.

Hey Will - off-topic, but have to say, I love your site design. Simple, appealing and user-friendly. Great.


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## TheWill (Oct 4, 2006)

Ross B said:


> Hey Will - off-topic, but have to say, I love your site design. Simple, appealing and user-friendly. Great.


Sticking to the off-topic: thanks! I appreciate feedback from qualified users such as yourself.


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

This does look pretty promising. 

The only downside I see right now is that it's in very early BETA and it doesn't have support for regular PayPal processing (only the Payflo Pro version of PayPal that costs $20 per month)

I think I may try a test install soon to see how it goes.


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## cohort (Jan 27, 2007)

I went searching through their documentation, and found one thing that is a major turnoff for us - Attribute lists and configurable products are neither. You have to manually create a product for every possible permutation, then group them together into a 'super product'... 

Say you have a shirt design available on three shirt colors and 7 sizes - you have to create 22 different entries in the backend.


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## EnMartian (Feb 14, 2008)

We looked at this about a year and a half ago when we were considering what to do with our EnMart site. At the time it didn't have a lot of user documentation and it was very buggy. Granted that was a year and a half ago and it has probably progressed a long way. 

I'll be interested to hear feedback from anyone who tries it.


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## Reppin (Apr 3, 2009)

I have been using it for a few months now, developed three separate stores with one single checkout - its in the sig. I built the sites from scratch - first shopping cart I ever built.


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## texemb (Dec 2, 2005)

I'm trying to build with Magento now. Love the Plaidola site, did you use a base template? What version are you using? I'd love to learn from what you did. It's simple, but functional.


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## Reppin (Apr 3, 2009)

texemb said:


> I'm trying to build with Magento now. Love the Plaidola site, did you use a base template? What version are you using? I'd love to learn from what you did. It's simple, but functional.


Thanks for the support. 

As far as a base template goes, we ripped apart the default template that comes with the package. If you compare that (default) with our template, there is no resemblance whatsoever, but you have to start somewhere. If you ever viewed the source code for the default template, you will see it is nearly impossible to create a template from "nothing". If you're building a template, I suggest starting with a free one (ie default, modern or other on magento connect), tearing it apart, and building it how you like. It's not hard, but it's not easy either. Contact forum member "the funk" if you want some paid help, he did most of this project. From our experience, the magento forum boards are not as friendly as we would like, not like zen or cubecart forums. 

The version we first started with was I believe 1.7 or so. I just upgraded it literally 5 minutes ago to 1.3.1.2 or whatever it is. 

We lost a couple of features we really liked, but gained a few too that will help us with the iphone/blackberry user optimized templates, coming soon on our sites. Those are cool, showing a iphone/blackberry user a template that is optimized for his/her experience. Our share button even has a text this product to a friend feature, so we need to catch up with this technology and our themes.

"Simple but functional" - yea, that was the goal. Take a look at the most sucessful t shirt sites, or any other ecommerce site for that matter. That is exactly what they are, simple. Choose from a couple hundred designs/products, pick your size, color, etc, and checkout. Crazy intense websites are for developers, arcades, gambling, music, youth, blowing your free time, etc, not for ecommerce. When people want to "play", they go to "playing" sites. When people want to buy, they go to buying sites. It's really that simple.

Since you said you like the Plaidola site and it has to do with magento, I will throw out the shameless plug of the day. We just figured out how to use Magento to do limited edition products, which you can not do with configurable products. Be on the lookout for some of those. All will be numbered and some will be super rare (some as low as out of 50)


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## RM5 (May 6, 2009)

Reppin said:


> Thanks for the support.
> 
> As far as a base template goes, we ripped apart the default template that comes with the package. If you compare that (default) with our template, there is no resemblance whatsoever, but you have to start somewhere. If you ever viewed the source code for the default template, you will see it is nearly impossible to create a template from "nothing". If you're building a template, I suggest starting with a free one (ie default, modern or other on magento connect), tearing it apart, and building it how you like. It's not hard, but it's not easy either. Contact forum member "the funk" if you want some paid help, he did most of this project. From our experience, the magento forum boards are not as friendly as we would like, not like zen or cubecart forums.
> 
> ...


We have had a look at Magento every 3 or 4 months for the last couple of years. Well maybe every 6 months. It is always so bloated that we just walk away. On, the other hand it some of the the stuff they seem to be getting together is interesting.

I totally agree we sell to our niche. I am not horribly interested in what developer is not getting along with whatever, whichever folks.

Will have a look at your shameless plug over the weekend. 

Richard


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## Rodney (Nov 3, 2004)

RM5 said:


> We have had a look at Magento every 3 or 4 months for the last couple of years. Well maybe every 6 months. It is always so bloated that we just walk away. On, the other hand it some of the the stuff they seem to be getting together is interesting.
> 
> I totally agree we sell to our niche. I am not horribly interested in what developer is not getting along with whatever, whichever folks.
> 
> ...


I'm in the same boat. I get the magento newsletters and I check out the software every few months, but it all seems so complex (like almost intentionally complex to steer people toward paid service solutions).

The featureset seems very nice and the amout of configuration you can do is awesome. 

So far, the community efforts behind cubecart/zencart/oscommerce seem more helpful to getting the average store owner up and running on their own. I tried installing Magento and that part went fine, but the customization and adding of products part is when things got a bit too complicated.

I'll still keep looking at it and hoping it will improve.


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## The Other Scene (Nov 24, 2009)

Has anyone recently looked back in Magento?


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## vadan (Mar 9, 2010)

We are running magento, it is an exceptionally well made and powerful management system, we started development on v1.3.2.4 but are in the process of upgrading to an even better v1.4 now.

I would highly recommend Magento especially for us garment retailers, the configurable products features makes selling t-shirts a breeze.


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## SickPuppy (Aug 10, 2009)

My website is Magento, You-Design-Online.com I love the template but the shopping cart is slow and I mean slow.


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## vadan (Mar 9, 2010)

SickPuppy said:


> My website is Magento, You-Design-Online.com I love the template but the shopping cart is slow and I mean slow.


We had a similar problem, it's not the cart it's ur server, we took some professional advice and decided o take a dedicated server (we expect high traffic I've time) so made sense. Both back and front end work very fast. Havin the wrong server compatibility can also cause SEO rewrite conflicts which mean search engines won't see u properly. A good dedicated magenta server is around £150 p/a.


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## mads (Jul 31, 2010)

I've tried playing around with it, but found it bloated on the back end. Additionally, the templates were very hard to develop “from scratch” but I guess I should've just customized an existing one. Might look back into it the next time I'm asked to develop an E-commerce solution (I'm a web designer) but for now I'm sticking to Wordpress E-commerce or Lemonstand.


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