S-Tastic Designs - Web Designer for Hire

Let’s be honest with each other for a moment.

There are just about as many e-commerce platforms out there as there are people selling on the internet.  From those platforms are plugins to Wordpress (WPSC for example); through the old establishment (osCommerce); to the relative newcomers like Magento.

So, how do you pick what is right for you - and is it worth making the move to Magento?

Simply put - the answer is YES, or…well….actually it could be NO

And therein lies the problem.

You see - Magento is simply amazing.  It is a fully featured - robust - infinitely flexible e-commerce platform.  Virtually anything that 90% of the selling population would want to do is a standard feature.  The other 10% are probably generating enough online revenue to justify bespoke development.

Which sounds great - but before you rush over to the Magento site to download and install - here are a few things to bear in mind:

1. Installation is not straightforward - it takes planning and effort
2. The amount of options that need to be set when you first start is high (think hundreds rather than dozens)
3. Inputting your products is more than an afternoons work if you have more than two - there are around 10 steps to each product
4. Uploading existing catalogues may not be easy (although migration tools are available for some of the more popular e-commerce platforms)
5. Styling the store is not simple!
6. A degree of PHP and HTML knowledge, whilst not a must-have, is advisable
7. If you break your install - fixing it can be traumatic

Which makes selecting Magento a bit less straightforward.  On the plus side though you have:

1. Cross-selling, upselling and addon sales are all standard features
2. A robust newsletter platform is standard (although you are going to have to code your own HTML newsletters and there seems to be no option for sending mult-part emails)
3. The array of payment gateways is colossal
4. The language pack options is equally colossal
5. The amount of shipping option combinations seems to be virtually infinite
6. Tier pricing is standard
7. SEO features such as sitemap, bespoke meta info/page title/description and SEO URLs are all standard

So, to revisit the question - what is all the fuss about?

This is an enterprise level product.  A major corporation could run their online sales through this software and would not be embarrassed to do so. If you have a hundred or so products - you could easily justify the effort to implement this software.

Which leaves those of us with a few dozen pondering whether it is worthwhile or not.

The amount of hours you will have to dedicate (or buy) to your Magento install to begin with is quite high. If your actual or projected sales can justify this - then Magento is arguably the best game in town.  If you have a few products - or lots of low value ones - or you are not selling (or intending to sell) many items per month you would almost be better of with WPSC or something like that.

Other tools may not have the huge wealth of features of Magento - but this has to be balanced with what is right for you.

An example of a well implemented site is Welsh Farm Organics which started on WPSC and then outgrew it and was moved to Magento.

The fuss - well - it is free - and (could be/should be/maybe) fabulous!

Related Posts

• Magento - Behind the scenes part one
• Variations & Google Checkout
• Empty Space in Grid View