I’ve been using Magento Commerce since it’s early early preview release back in August of 07′. I’ve been a junkie ever since. It took me about an hour playing with the framework to decide that THIS was the solution i’d been waiting for. Not only is it open-source, a godsend for developers, but the ingenuity, the community, and the true MVC nature of the framework just rubbed me in all the right places.
Any developer knows that the E-commerce space has sucked for some time now. Yes… sucked. Been crap. Nothing to get excited over. And for myself… the majority of my clients are small, up and coming businesses, entrepreneurs themselves who don’t have the budget for an over-priced ASP or custom solution. I like those people, I like their drive and ambition.. and I’m happy I can provide them with something to let them bang out with the big shots.
My most recent Magento project www.kanemarie.com, is a luxury jewelry retailer. Previously hosted by a ASP-driven box, I took on the project to really push magento to its limits. I’ve been happy with the results. Lot more work to go though. Magento just makes you WANT to code. Your not stuck within a limited system like say an OScommerce, or X-cart…. trust I’ve was a whore for them both in the past.
Why do I love Magento? From a design standpoint… you can literarally skin this baby anyway you wish. The Design is TRUELY seperate from the code. So CSS fanatics dig in. No need to mix PHP code within some smarty template with your xhtml. That in itself is a MAJOR improvement.
Another improvement is the code-base itself, the team behind magento has put alot of time into developing a smart, saavy system that can deliver results amongst a variety of e-commerce stores. Multiple language support, Multiple stores, Smart browsing via layered navigation, RSS product feeds, tagging and reviewing products, comparing products, product wishlists…. even Product Image Zoom is standard right out of the box. Impressive? Trust me theres more once you pop the hood.
But I think I started this blog and made blogging about magento my first post because of the community behind this project. Like I said, I’ve been playing with Magento since last August during its early preview release and I’ve had the pleasure of not only talking to the team.. but several developers, store owners, and cool people alike within the forums and magento blog. There’s a surge of support that’s uncanny for a software project this early in its lifespan. I’m thrilled to say I’m apart of the community, and invite any other developers to join as well. Ask and answer, show off your sites, and enjoy what definitely is E-commerce evolved. I sure am.
Go Go Magento!!
Look forward to more posts on this blog about specific tips and tricks with developing e-commerce sites with magento. Feel free to message me on the magento forum or send me a msg via Twitter as well.
20 Comments
May 15, 2008 at 1:26 am
Thanks for the kind words Nick! Great to have you part of the Magento Community.
Roy (Magento)
May 15, 2008 at 2:17 am
Hi, and thanks for posting your comments.
I, too, have recently developed a serious crush on Magento. However, the speed thing just kills me. On my stock, default install, it takes nearly 30 seconds to view the cart contents (time after hitting cart link and results being displayed). The admin is also achingly slow (it takes nearly a minute to load the admin landing page after logging in). I am behind 1.5 Mb DSL, btw.
However, I was noticing that the cart contents loads A LOT faster on your site than my “stock” site. However, the categories were still taking about 10-20 seconds for me to completely load.
Which brings me to my question, have you done specific things to “tune” Magento to load faster? I am hosted at Mosso now, and I am trying to gauge how much of the speed issue is the clustered solution (although, other php ecommerce solutions zip right along), or the fact that the database is not local to the web server, or what.
Again, I agree with most of our comments in that Magento seemed like the solution I have been looking for for years. The speed issue just kills me, though. I just cannot imagine customers waiting 15-20 seconds for every page to load. I know it drives me nuts.
Anyway, not to hijack your post, this is just (obviously) an issue that I would *love* to address, simply because Magento seems so seriously awesome.
I would love to hear your thoughts on all this. Thanks for your time, and thank you for posting your comments.
May 14, 2008 at 10:27 pm
@Roy
Thanks a bunch for the comment. You guys rock!
@John
No worries at all.. not a hijack at all! I look forward to discussing tips, techniques, and tricks for really making magento perform well on this blog. So I appreciate you taking the time to comment.
I’ve noticed some speed issues on different sites, yes. There’s been much discussion about it on the magento forums. I’ve actually witnessed first-hand the speed of magento increasing bit by bit with each release leading up the 1.0 version, and I’m positive the magento team is going to continue to streamline this. But if your anything like me… you want results now!
For one, I’m running magento on a dedicated box so that helps out a tremendous amount. I also took advantage of using eAccelerator with apache to help with the cache some. On my current Magento site….there is some loading delay simply because of the hi-res images… most are 100-150k a piece. (Yes….not lightweight at all but most of our visitors don’t mind the wait to see the photography). So that could be apart of the delay.
I’d recommend maybe trying a magento installation on a VPS or Dedicated box, along with a local mysql server…i’m sure thats causing some of your lag. Mediatemples VPS solutions are great and pretty affordable.
In the meantime i’ll research this further, it will always vary server to server but there may be certain techniques we can develop to help cut the load time. Have you ran Yslow or u site and seen its results?
May 14, 2008 at 11:23 pm
I too have been watching magento very closely, but as another poster mentioned the speed issue kills it. Until they can make it run quickly on shared hosting there is just no way it will get a large market saturation or that I can recommend it to my customers. The improvement they made just before the 1.0 release was great, but I’d say they need bare minimum another 50% improvement before it will become viable for smaller clients that don’t want to pay for a dedicated box. In my testing that is the only thing that will run it at a reasonable speed, and that is without any sort of load. I haven’t even bothered with any load testing yet. At this point it is slow enough on shared hosting (and yes vps is a shared host actually worse if you really know how they work) that it annoys me to try to navigate the shop so I can only guess how many customers wouldn’t bother.
I love all the features and desperately want it to be the next great thing in ecommerce, but I just don’t see it at least not for quite some time unless they put an extraordinary effort into performance improvements.
May 16, 2008 at 10:41 am
Thanks for sharing your work!!!!!!
Tim
May 17, 2008 at 8:58 pm
Fantastic! Your post made me desire to learn Magento much more.
May 28, 2008 at 1:24 am
Im start to getting hooked to Magento !
Im from the Fashion industry, start few months ago with a basic online store, and now want to go to the next level , and i think Magento is the next level and the best shopping cart on the market !
I would love to hire you to design our site..
If you are available i would live if you can contact me
cyril@cyanalab.com
thanks and keep on the good work
C*
June 2, 2008 at 9:12 pm
The speed kills but thrills is all i am going to say about magento at the moment! It is definitely opened a new level of e commerce. I disagree with the point that it is only for the programmers to play around with. I found the last release of magento’s admin panel to be quite user friendly to use and setup a store in few minutes with out any costumising the look of it, which i must say is quite refreshing and good looking. It doesn’t support multi vendor login nor the multiple item selection. So basically 3 things for the magento guys to work around to make this the greatest e-commerce open source ever!
1. Work on the speed issues
2.Multiple item selection
3.Multi vendor login.
If any of you have already given this a shot at, please post your reply here in this forum
http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/9327/
October 18, 2008 at 11:12 pm
hi
I was leading a team of asp.net developers building ecomerce sites when I came across magento I decided that its time to move to php
I liked the must is the tru mvc architecture
I am also running my own site http://www.officegrabs.com I am in the process to migrate it to magento office.simplehelix.com
I noticed that when I need it to create small modules add ons the tea. kept telling me to go to a third party I tried 3 times for 3 different module so I am wondering what realy there level of support??
November 4, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Check out http://www.ecommerce-extensions.com
They’re running a campaing today – 50% discount on all their Magento Templates!
December 6, 2008 at 2:08 am
Hi
I want to ask that can i change the zencart template into the magento template.How much time it will require?
January 23, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Hi All
I am busy setting up an online computer store that will be operating in South-Africa. I did research for about a month to decide on shopping cart software. Initially I had a look at X-cart. I thought it was the solution but unfortunately the looks really put me off. I could not find templates I like either. Luckily I stumbled upon Magento. It was a God sent. I fell in love immedietly. So I got a developer to set up my website on the Magento platform. You all can have a look at http://www.laptop-computers.co.za. The design is great and I like all the neat features of Magento.
But as soon as it was up and running I realized that it tales a long time to load. This is concerning for an e-commerce site.
What can I do to get the load speed up. Should I consider dedicated hosting? What are my options?
I would appreciate it if anyone can give some advise on this.
February 3, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Anyone know about the possibility of integrating a configurator onto the Magento platform?
February 10, 2009 at 4:51 am
Please Help.
I also am interested in setting up a magento site but am scared what the end costs will be?.
I am trying to gage how long a web designer would take to set up the most basic site.
Something that has my branding, allows me to upload my own products and obviously allow customers to purchase and pay for my products online.
any help would be much appreciated??
March 19, 2009 at 7:22 am
Magento is good from functionality point of view – that’s it.
It’s deadly slow, and even with mysql query cache, output buffering with gzip, increasing memory for php etc.. is still slow – unless you have a superman server to dedicate only to magento. And guess what it becomes more expensive than a custom built solution.
Try prestashop too.
March 20, 2009 at 5:54 am
But Prestashop have half of Magento’s functionality and I have seen a lot of stores running on Magento pretty well.
May 11, 2009 at 2:23 am
hi,
First of Nice information on magento,
I am working in magento platform from last year, and I m very happy for its market boom….
I developed many of the sites as well as customizations
anybody can contact me, I will complete your any type of requirement regarding magento.
Thanks
Avadhesh Shukla
avadhesh_business@yahoo.in
June 2, 2009 at 11:35 am
Magento has become quite popular e-commerce platform lately. Large number of retailers abandon their shopping carts and choose Magento.
If you are one of them there’s an easy way to do it. You may try web service called Cart2Cart. It automates migration to Magento.
You can get more details at http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com
October 19, 2009 at 9:42 am
Hi, I have an ekashu payment gateway integrated in Magento, The Payments go through, but it doesn’t redirect back customers site, and the confirmation emails seem to be intermittent. Though we can see the payment pending in the back end, the customer does not know if his payment has gone through. Have you ever had any experience of this type of problem
Jer
Bristol
UK
October 31, 2009 at 12:23 am
hey,
Can anybody please tell me if Magento supports multiple vendor system?
If not are there any extra modules to do the same.