Open-source e-commerce increasingly means Magento
A friend pointed me to news that Magento, a leading open-source commerce platform, has cracked 500,000 downloads, not to mention its 44,000 community members that have translated the project into over 60 languages. That is progress that money can't buy, or at least not cheaply.
But that's only half the story. It has been said that "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," and the real story behind Magento's success is that it's breeding copycats. Several proprietary competitors, like Oxid eShop, are throwing in the towel and open sourcing their code, too.
The Magento project, founded by Varien in 2001, hasn't been around long, but it's already disrupting the e-commerce market. It's also getting attention from The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Earlier this year I talked up Varien/Magento as a company and project to watch. I was speculating at that time, but today its success seems relatively sure. It's now a question of "how big?" for Magento, not "will it take off?"
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
@tangfucius: head on to http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/magento_showcase_stores to see the stores built on Magento. Just use a normal hosting - $20/month is not too much for great speed.
Thanks again.
Roy / Magento
This is really targeted at small web shops or small consulting firms / contractors to throw up a quick e-commerce solution. In that context, it's a very good piece of software.
Very good software in terms of features and software sophistication, but it's almost over engineered... It reminds me of SugarCRM when it first came out. Over-engineering and designing end up being a pretty but slow solution not suitable for prime time. You can tell it's developed by really smart guys, but the route they took to get exposure is through exhaustive list of features that are not tuned well enough yet.
You have to setup Apache or Ngenix for the web server. I've heard great things about Ngenix but I went ahead and used Apache(2). With Apache you need to change the config setttings so you're not using too much memory or providing too many connections. Then you need to use enable mod_php in Apache. Mod_php will cache your php scripts which will greatly increase load times! It does take some configuration tweaking! My Magento store now loads in about 1-2 seconds(cable modem).
You take a big hit on the first load with all of the Javascript libraries required by Magento(roughly 300kb). My hompage is about 550kb all total. There is a Magento compression add-on called "Fooman Speedster" that will bring it down to about a total of 300KB. I haven't had the time to try "Fooman Speedster". So, Magento is acceptable for broad band users. Of course, you are probably going to alienate your dialup modem users. You can just go into the Magento core code and prevent most of the Javascript from being pushed down to the clients. From what I can tell the Javascript isn't used that much except for in the search tool and in the administration tools(ie drag and drop). Just remember to backup the database(sql dump) and backup the webserver Magento directory before fiddling with Magento.
Don't let what I said above scare you. The big win in Magento is the product inventory admin tools that allow configurable products, cross-sells, up sells, automatic thumbnailing....and on and on..... I haven't done much load testing but Magento is working out well on my small business site. I recommend Magento for small businesses and mid-level sized businesses. The initial investment in server setup and store layout is worth it. With the decreased costs in man hours needed to maintain your store products and layout you will most likely save on man hours. If your site goes huge, and you start making a lot of money and your servers are strained. that is a fabulous problem to have.
The Magento internals seem to need some tweaking for optimization to increase speed. Also, I've had a lot of problems with Magento internal caching system(Apache, server settings getting in way? not sure why). The guys at Varien/Magento will probably have a lot of the speed and other minor issues straightened out within the next 6 months. If they can find a way to streamline the server configuration that would make it a lot easier for server installs. The Magento install tool is a step in the right direction.
I recommend Magento for people that don't mind a technical challenge on the server setup side. If you don't feel up to spending 40-80 hours on server setup and store inventory configuration(payments processing, coupon setup, graphics.....etc). I'll admit, I'm kind of slow on setup and I learn through lots of trial and even more error. You may want to wait a couple of more releases for the code base to mature. OR......you can bite the bullet and pay the guys at Varien/Magento to do your store setup. They seem to have very reasonable fees that a small business can afford.
Best of Luck!
John
--Oh, google adwords rated my Magento store a 7 out of 10(load time..etc.)
If you're one of those spending $5 hosting and complaining that Magento is too slow - then you shouldn't really use it. If you don't take your online business serious enough to spend some money for a decent server then Magento is not for you. Magento is only for serious online shops -
We are investigating Magento and Oxid right now, planning some serious performance testing. I've been looking into Oxid Communiy Edition, and it's looks like a fantastic open source product. Oxid uses a test-driven development (DDT) approach. Magento hasn't done that and is right now starting to switch to DDT (from what I heard). So I'd say Oxid is a bit ahead of Magento, but that's just a feeling.
My guess is that the $20 magento hosts have this htacess file pre-edited, which makes their service seam faster, not sure about that but just my guess.
- by lesya30 June 23, 2009 6:44 AM PDT
- Magento is certainly one of the most used platforms lately. More people find Magento to be perfect for their business. If you also want to join growing number of Magento users you can try switching to this popular e-commerce platform with service cart2cart. This web service automates data migration from your shopping cart to Magento (http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com)
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