Why I No Longer Recommend Magento Community Edition To Small Businesses
Let me preface this with a quote from yours truly…
I Love Magento
Yes, that was me about a year ago. However, I have sadly changed my tune…
How me and Magento got started
I was on the rebound from a very difficult relationship with OSCommerce. Trying to SEO oscommerce had left me empty and wanton for a truly meaningful relationship with an open source ecommerce solution. After a quick fling with Zencart, Magento made its debut and it was love at first sight for me.
It had most of the features that I wanted. Plus, I didn’t mind being seen in public with the packaged UI front end. Heck, I was kinda proud of her. One of the first clients I put on Magento used the then packaged “Blue” theme and did more than $1ook in sales in a year. Not bad for a mom and pop shop that had no experience selling online.
I eagerly anticipated every new release, every new module. I spent countless hours combing over lines and lines of code seeking to know everything about her. I even made myself familiar with her extremely complex database. I overlooked little flaws like, its slow load times and inefficient DB and Caching functions.
Being a little naive, I expected Magento to follow in the footsteps of WordPress. To be the World’s greatest open source ecommerce solution with a thriving open source minded community that always helped each other out. It wasn’t to be…
The commercialization of Magento
I won’t forget how my heart sank when Irubian launched the enterprise edition of Magento that would eventually be used by large companies such as Samsung and Homedics. I had noticed how the best Magento modules started costing money so I should have seen this coming.
After all, this is a great business tactic if you can pull it off. Build a great product and offer it for free. Hold back some of the better capabilities and only offer them in the upgrade. What I didn’t expect was for Magento to limit some of the most basic capabilities. For example:
- Coupons and discounts don’t work in community edition
- User roles. Anyone who has access to the store, has access to all admin privileges.
Costly Magento issues
The truth is that Magento was never designed to be a true tool for those without start up capital or programming knowledge.
- Even if you have very little traffic to your store you will need a strong hosting solution to even run Magento. For the store to run at a basic level you will be paying at least $300 per year in hosting.
- I always schedule several days of time before I upgrade Magento. Themes and modules are usually broken in upgrade and sometimes require advanced programming skills to fix. A good Magento programmer can cost $100 an hour…and that gets expensive quickly.
- Plus, I don’t dare upgrade Magento on a live site. I create a sandbox and test everything there first. This creates hours and hours of work. Magento could seriously use some help in this area (ie WordPress). Heck, upgrading oscommerce was a better experience!
- Designing templates for Magento is timely and costly. It is not as simple as creating a mock up, XHTML page and dropping a few calls (like WordPress), you have to study and understand Magento’s complex xml block system.
- Every update makes Magento more complex and harder to manage.
So why not fork out the money for the enterprise edition? Have you seen the annual price on that thing?
- Community Edition: Free – lacks needed functionality
- Professional Edition (starting at $2,995 yearly – you get coupons
- Enterprise Edition (starting at $12,995 yearly – you get a gift registry
BTW, Enterprise is the only Magento edition that has full page caching options. Apparently, many businesses with the finances have found the above solutions acceptable. I have never used them, so I don’t know how well they work.
I could go on and on about why Magento is not a good choice for start ups with little money. Or why the community edition is not a good choice period. I still use Magento and will continue to program and offer helpful tips whenever possible. Unfortunately, I am now looking for another solution, perhaps a paid one 
that offers regular support.
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August JOhnston says:
Jason, I like your article. I am just learning about adding/developing shopping carts. I am about ready to use WP combined with the google shopping cart plugin. Do you have any experience with google’s merchant accounts? I am also curious to know where you are leaning to… instead of magento. Magento has been suggested to me and upon researching the WP/Magento combination, I found THIS article. I was surprised to see how recently it was posted.
The site I want to develop would only start out with 9-15 products. Avg unit price being $8.95US. I would like to be able to support international transactions, which I believe google does. and im certain people will feel safe about using a google checkout page. I think security is a big issue with allot of online shoppers using Credit/debit cards. with that in mind… I would love to hear some possible suggestions/alternatives.
thank you kindly,
August Johnston
Jason says:
August, thank you for stopping by. I cannot recommend anything off hand. Google checkout is well recognized and does meet international standards for credit card transactions. With only 9-15 products, you may want to try someone like bigcommerce.com. They have a 15 day free trial and may suit your needs.
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carp forum says:
Great article. My store when eventually finnished will have many many products yet can’t afford and justify paying the money for the upgraded versions for what you get. So stuck with the community edition which so far has been nothing but a knightmare to get going. Currently made the mistake of upgrading which can’t really avoid forever but I need to upgrade my php installer for it to actaully work. taken 2 days and still can’t upgrade yet. So far nothing has been install and run in magento. Error followed by error etc but I know will be worth it in the end. Thing that really worries me is I will have about 6 extensions and with upgrades etc its only ever going to cause me grief. Hopefully by then I can afford to hire someone to do this side for me.
Jason Capshaw says:
I feel your pain
Ash says:
Jason,
Neat article, i came across this when i was trying to get more info on the community version of magento. The paid version are too high. I am trying to find a stable, flexible e-com cms. Magento seemed great with it’s theme options and layouts. But man, the enterprise edition is expensive. What would you recommend for a store that will have 20 to 30 different categories of items and 10,000 products? Is there anything out there? One that is premium and does not cost a lot? Do let me know.
Cheers,
Ash
Gerry says:
Hello guys
I was going to try out magentos community version , until i read this article, it seems that the community version is not as good as i though. There is an open source ecommerce solution called ecwid, it works with joomla, wordpress and other softwares. It is very easy to set up, the only problem is that it doesnt have a lot of modules like Magento.
If you find any other open source ecommerce solution, let me know , please !
cheers
Paulo says:
Agree with the sentiments here.
You might want to check out PrestaShop.
It won the Packt Publishing award for Best Open Source Ecommerce project this year.
The latest version of Prestashop does pretty much all the Magento does and often a lot better too.
Tina says:
I tried every single plugin that is currently offered up for WordPress eCommerce and all of them pale in comparison to Magento Community. Cart 66 is improving but not where it needs to be for me yet.
My luck with Magento Community has been pretty good. Knock on wood I haven’t had to hire a programmer yet. I am technical but I don’t know any code. The Magento catalog and shopping cart price rules work well for me. I also recently setup a custom sales role to keep the order processors out of the configuration area. I stick with Hello Themes because I’m afraid to trust anyone else. I feel that Magento theme offerings are still like the wild wild west.
Cheers,
Tina
Jason says:
@Tina, it is true that WordPress does not currently have a plugin that truly compares to the flexibility and functionality of Magento. However, I have found templatic themes to be great for Ecommerce, as they have the shopping cart built in. I really hope Magento continues to work for you, thats what counts
Dave says:
Hi Jason,
I was wondering what you are recommending now? I’ve tried Magento but the community edition was nightmarishly complicated right from the start. Magento Go looked good but it doesn’t have enough features. Zen Cart is ok but SEO un-friendly and it looks like version 2.0 is dead in the water with only security updates coming out. WP Ecommerce looked promising but I found support patchy and even paid add-ons have bugs months or years old. Someone here mentioned PrestaShop? Is that any good?
cheers,
Dave
Brent says:
Anyone try OpenCart? It installed easily with nice sample data for me. Not near as in depth as Magento Community Edition, but I had the theme integrated in an hour or 2 versus a couple of days wrapping my head around Magento’s theme coding and admin panel in general. OpenCart was much faster on page load (front and back end) than Magento. Ended up using Magento on one project just for the solid mailing list integration.
Printers 3D says:
Like Brent, I have been using both Magento and Opencart recently. I’m worried about the page load speed with Magento and it does seem to require quite a bit of work to get a reasonable looking shop together. Open cart, on the other hand, seems too good to be true! Functioning site, that’s easy on the eye, and easy for my client to use the back end, all within a few hours. I’m sure there is something I’m missing, but I’ve yet to spot it yet, so do not hesitate to let me know.
Johan says:
Prestashop is by far the easiest thing Ive ever experienced. I was thinking about magento aswell but seems to be à pretty heavy system. Prestashop is fast, easy and has great modules in my opinion
cheers guys!
Richard says:
>> User roles. Anyone who has access to the store, has access to all admin privileges.
Are you sure? In the past I have set up different users with different access levels, I can control what they can edit and what they see!
Richard
rony says:
You definitely have something to say and you say it with style, my man! You sure do have an interesting way of drawing people in cash advance, what with your videos and your words. You’ve got quite a one-two punch for a blog!Bachelor life
jason says:
I’ve written lots of code and templates for Enterprise but almost nothing for Community edition. I’ve made many websites using Joomla with Virtuemart. It does a decent job. I think magento’s implementation is a bit more professional but I guess that depends on the implementation. The good part about magento is all the built ins, but the speed and special hosting requirements are a real pain. I’m looking for something much faster than magento but more secure than a joomla / virtuemart site (joomla / virtuemart = free and you can get away with a very basic hosting package)
I have also looked into wordpress ecommerce. still not sure which way I will go. I know one thing for sure, I will never go with enterprise as its cost is way too steep.
What says:
Hmmm I’m pretty sure you can use coupons and promo codes with the Community Edtion.
Ed says:
Nice post. Everyone loves and recommends Magento until it’s time to upgrade or you need to back-out or remove an extension. It’s definitely not for Mom and Pop stores. Magento is great if you’re a developer yourself or you have one on staff because, like you stated, things take a long time to finish up if anything doesn’t go smoothly (which it never does). Hours-wise, I can see blowing through hundreds and near a thousand dollars just debugging each upgrade (if you’re outsourcing).
Another thing about Magento, it just feels that a lot of the Extensions have a shady feel to them. I think a lot of that might be language barrier and my unfamiliarity community, but a lot of the Magento ecosystem is non-US, as opposed to WordPress.
If you’ve got the development chops to maintain Magento on a beefy host, or you’ve got a developer friend that you can blackmail for hours and hours of work, then I still think it’s the best thing going for a pretty full featured eCommerce solution, but if what you’re doing is selling a few products to a patient consumer niche, then I’d definitely go with a hosted solution.
giovanni says:
Great post. i will translate in italian your opinions and your experience (i have a similar experience).
Now i’m using prestashop, but it’s very slow with a big or complex catalogue.
If you find a good solution…tell me
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