11 Reasons Why Magento Is An eCommerce Platform Worth Considering

“I have worked with many of them, and I also have experience with enterprise-level content management systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Magento out performed them all. It is an excellent platform worthy of the four and a half out of a possible five stars that I am awarding it in this The PeC Review”

Our experience has been similiar and we are finding that our clients who haved been using “Virtuemart” and “Oscommerce” are now starting to migrate their old outdated technologies to a newer and more efficient technology environment.

Another review by eCommlab was also very impressed with Magento and these are the 11 reasons that they also gave Magento the thumbs up.

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. Google base formatting & support for downloadable products - very nice.

But just to be as impartial as possible, Corby from eCommlab also stated that “these 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.

Also here are another “8 reviews on Magento”

So how is your current eCommerce website is it delivering what you need to compete in the increasingly competitive online shopping world? Look forward to hearing your experience

Tagged as: CMS, eCommerce, Online Store, Open Source, SEO, Website Design