Comments on: Open-source e-commerce increasingly means Magento

Magento is fast gaining traction as the industry's leading open-source e-commerce solution.

[daniellphillips]

I agree 100%. Roy Rubin has delivered an amazing, open source product.

[tangfucius]

have you used it? It's the slowest e-commerce platform I've seen. Looks pretty, lots of features, but it's impossible to host a popular e-commerce site using this. If you are a small shop and don't have many visitors, but it's a viable solution. Otherwise, no unless you have programmers to tweak it for you.

[m0sh3]

@Matt: a small correction, Varien was founded at 2001, Magento project started in 2007.

@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.

[brianlmoon]

Like several the other shiny open source apps (Wordpress, phpBB) that people fall all over, this one looks good to joe average user but sucks a big pickle on the insides. This will make the hardware vendors and hosting companies happy. You will need 5x the servers you should need. I run an open source project. I am not downing open source. I love it. I just can't figure out why people cling to bloated software.

[royrubin]

Matt - Thank you for the post. This is an incredible milestone for us and we are excited to see the uptake of Magento in a very short span of time. More great things are coming up ...

Thanks again.

Roy / Magento

[jacquelinekall]

If you are serious about selling online buy a decent hosting package. It doesn't take much, but a $10/month shared account won't make you money. If you're revenue doesn't support a decent environment go sell on eBay.

[tangfucius]

with hosting packages that are priced at $20/month running Magento, you would be very lucky to host 100 simultaneous users performing browsing, searching, and checking out. I've seen installations on dedicated server performing very poorly with decent number of concurrent users.

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.

[Pete532]

Magento is a very smooth and well thought out e-commerce platform. It does have performance issues that can be addressed, fixing those slow spots does take technical know how. I tried hosting Magento with my el cheapo $5 month shared hosting company(built everything in local dir and used fastcgi), Magento will work...but....Magento just takes too much memory for decent speed on shared hosting. My homepage took approximately 14 seconds to load. You need a virtual private server(VPS) plan to run Magento effectively. I went to slicehost.com and bought a $20 a month plan that includes 256mb of dedicated memory, 10gb of storage, and 100gb of transfer per month and no contracts, and root on your VPS slice. Note I don't work for Slicehost, their service is outstanding. super uptime, amazing knowledgeable tech support via text chat and a backup service that costs an additional $5 per month for the 256mb slice(daily, weekly, and server image). When your site gets more traffic and your sales increase you just buy more 256 mb slices.

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.)

While developing multiple websites for large fortune 1000 companies using Magento we have had no performance issues. We couldn't be happier and are thrilled with the e-commerce experience - browsing though large catalogs is a snap! I don't take product recommendations lightly, especially one as important as a new e-commerce system, but Magento is a no-brainer. I'm excited to see where they will be when the rest of the market catches up to where they are now.

[cfuller12]

I've also heard a great deal about Magento performance problems (though I've heard it's a very nice platform in other respects). I'm wondering if anyone has any "real" performance numbers or (even better) benchmarking against Oxid?

I think 500,000 is a good performance number to start with ;?) If there were major performance issues people would not be adopting it so quickly. As with any new platform there are always issues and features to improve upon but even on a crowded shared server (200+ sites) it works good - probably the reason why the number of magento hosts, sites, theme shops etc. keep growing. My hats off to the Magento team for producing a free product of this quality. It is this kind of open source spirit and commitment to quality that will raise the bar for commercial software corporations in the future.

[joomlavue]

500k download has nothing to do with the above adoption number, though we never get the real live stores number that are being powered by Magento but it is getting more and more popularity. Perhaps the most talked about issue since Magento inception late last year, went beta and finally go around stable is the performance issue but I believe the performance issue will improve over the next few release. Btw, if you're going into real e-commerce businesses, think about spending some money to host your Magento store would be for what it worth.

[ivanji07]

I've been working with Magento for over 6 months - and I've helped launched over 30 Magento shops by now. I've worked with most open source carts available and there's nothing close to it.

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 -

[rajubitter]

Oxid just announced that they open source their shop as Oxid eShop Community edition. It's a complete rewrite of the old source code, completely object-oriented. The source code basis is the same one as for the Oxid eShop Professional or Enterprise Edition.

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.

[atifdarr]

Please could you post your evaluation results of Magneto and Oxid. I would be very interested.

[connectgo]

I have found that a VERY simple htaccess edit found by searching google, increases magento speed by about 1000% in my experience, I am working on getting my first magento shop up and I don't think I need to spend $20 / Month for hosting during the development stage, especially since I plan on doing over 100 shops for myself and current and future clients, I as a web host provider my self better be able to figure out how to get speed out of limited resources, resources cost money, and you can get good speeds out of $3 hosting, with 1 click install of magento I have found is plenty good, possibly even for a live store, but for sure good enough for development, once I get a site up I have no problem dedicating a VPS or a server, or a cluster to a web site.

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.

[lesya30]

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)