Magento eCommerce Unofficial Blog

Today I went through the entire Magento website and looked at everything I could. Some thoughts from their Why Magento page:

• No Constraints The first points they make are that Magento is a “professional” solution and that it is flexible and doesn’t constrain your business to their model. “Never feel trapped in your eCommerce solution again”. Good so far…

• Completely Scalable So Magento is scalable…does this mean that if I buy a faster processor then it will be able to handle more users or does this mean that they will have data replication support and I’ll be able to run Magento on multiple web servers with database mirroring? Of course I can do that, but is it something they are planning for? If I have two Magento servers running will I have to work really hard to make sure there isn’t an order number collision before the database can replicate across or is that built in and just works? I can always hope…

• Professional and Community Support Magento is backed by a company called Varien, which is apparently a web development firm using it to make sites for their clients. Let’s look at the good and bad of it being controlled by a company:
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    PROS: Professional support is great to have as an option, even though it’s often expensive, because when something breaks and you’re losing orders you are willing to pay to get it done now. Community support is great because the open source community is second-to-none in its willingness to help you fix your problems. It is open source which is great because we can make changes and don’t have to worry about what happens to Varien. Also, free is always good :-)
    
    The problem with open source is that oftentimes even large projects are headed by one person who may be working on it in his free time, and perhaps a handful of people throw in bug fixes periodically. With Magento’s model you have an entire company with a vested interest in making the software better, because they use that software for their clients. Hopefully this will cut down on the long time between releases that seem to accompany other eCommerce software.
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    CONS: I haven’t seen which open source license Magento will be under. There are many “normal” ones that would be just fine, but it’s always possible that it gets some weird license that has some strange restriction. Hopefully that won’t happen. Another thing that remains to be seen is how tight Varien will want to control their creation. Will they allow outsiders to make contributions that get rolled into the main code base? We’ll just have to wait and see.

• Smooth Integration They are planning on integrating with third-party solutions — we’ll just have to see what.

• Cutting Edge Features Integrating whiz-bang features that few other systems have, right out of the box, will definitely attract developers. But you can’t build your system with only cutting edge features…everything else needs to be solid.

Speaking of features, let’s go through the Features page and see what looks interesting.

• Customer Accounts We take it for granted that customers can have their own account. Special little features include listing what items they’ve tagged or reviewed recently, their last viewed items, etc.

• Shopping Cart Ah yes, the shopping cart, where your customer tempts you by saying they want to buy something and then changing their mind and saying goodbye forever…actually, this can be minimized by making it as easy as possible for them to use, and that’s what Magento is going for. The shopping cart page will list the tax and shipping estimate, if it can calculate it, to avoid annoying customers that fill in all their personal information only to find that the shipping is more than they want to spend.

• Checkout “Tools for a Smooth Purchase” says Magento, and that’s what we need. Both single page and multi-page checkouts are built-in, as well as a Guest Checkout option. Perfect!

• Wishlist, Reviews, Tagging Some sellers will really like these features, others may not find them as useful. A small site won’t have enough customers to make reviewing or tagging very worthwhile, but if you either have a very large site or a fairly small set of products, these may be very appealing.

• Layered Navigation Drilling down by product attributes. Very important for some products.

• Product Comparison Put several products side-by-side on the same page to compare their attributes. It will be interesting to see how this is done. Sometimes features like this can be too confusing, but if done well, and for certain products, it could be a big hit.

• Search Search auto-completion!

• Ship to Multiple Addresses For some businesses this could be useful. Otherwise it may just be confusing for visitors.

• Customer Communication Magento will support RSS feeds, email notifications and email newsletters, complete with newsletter templates and reports.

• Search Engine Optimization This is a big one. You want your site to have the easiest possible URLs for search engines to navigate through it without being stuck on sessions. Ideally you can also put some keywords up there. Magento does that. It also creates a sitemap protocol sitemap which is great.

Now on to the Administrative Features:

• Dashboard It looks like they are including a bunch of reports and there will be a quick way to get a birds-eye picture of what’s going on. A cool little feature is a real-time customer list so you can actually see what customers are doing right now.

• Order Management This tool sounds great for phone agents. You will actually be able to log on to your website and check out the customer’s shopping cart, even see what other items they were viewing to help them complete their order.

• Permissions Of course it should be expected that some of your employees only have limited access to administrative sections of the site.

• Import/Export A boring section, perhaps, but this is where a program can really shine if implemented correctly. When you have tens or even hundreds of thousands of parts, using a web interface to edit can be tedious and it’s sometimes easier to just pull up a spreadsheet. I have a client that sells parts: lawnmower parts, ATV parts, Snowmobile parts, go-kart parts …well, you get the idea. Lots and lots and lots of parts, which makes editing their data cumbersome. The problem is that the more complex an eCommerce system gets, the harder it is to represent that data in a format that can be edited in a one-row-per-product spreadsheet design. It remains to be seen as to how Magento handles this. It looks like it also keeps a history of imports/exports — it would be great if besides revision tracking they had full revision support with rollback capability.

• Customer Groups Give certain customers permanent discounts. May be useful.

• Content Management System (CMS) A fancy way of saying that you’ll be able to create static HTML pages that link to your catalog. Well, it’s necessary.

• Products and Catalog Products can have many different attributes.

• Tax Flexible tax rules.

• Reports A bunch of reports is always good.

• Marketing Features Multi-tier pricing, where the cost of a product decreases when you buy more, is very useful for some stores. Also useful will be the coupon functionality, which looks like it will be quite flexible.

Other, general features:

• Payment Authorize.net, PayPal, and Google Checkout will be supported from day one. Great. You’ll also be able to allow checks, money orders, etc.

• Shipping Real time shipping integration will be available. Also, it looks like it will be very flexible in how you decide to charge for shipping (flat per item, flat per order, free shipping, table rates).

• International Multiple languages and multiple currencies will be supported for those who need such features.

• Multiple Websites Basically inheritance for eCommerce sites. Cool.

• Design Magento is going to come with some sets of pre-built templates. We’ll have to wait and see how easy it is to customize them and/or build our own. One problem with some other eCommerce packages is that in order to make a really slick, easy to use, templating system they have to abstract things so much that the software runs really slowly and has to make a done of database queries just to build a simple page. Hopefully Magento can have a good templating system that’s built for speed. They are also planning on making it really easy to switch templates, even going so far as allowing you to make templates and set them up to switch automatically at a certain date/time.

Other notes, obtained from various sources:

• Upgrading It seems clear that the Magento team know how big of pain it is to upgrade some software after you’ve customized it. They haven’t said how it will work but they have said that you’ll be able to customize a particular module and then upgrade Magento without losing your changes. That’s great, assuming it works as well as it is described.

• osCommerce A lot of comparisons have been made to osCommerce, with some speculating that Magento will actually be based on osCommerce with some administrative components using the Ext library. Varien has reported that Magento has been written from the ground-up, and is not based on osCommerce, for what that’s worth. The CEO of Varien notes that their upgrading system, plugins, and templating will be miles ahead of osCommerce.

• The Future The CEO of Varien also claims (or at least hopes), In 5 years, Magento will be the standard of open source eCommerce and have thousands of sites across the web. If it works as well as they predict then perhaps that will happen…we’ll see.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Magento looks very exciting. I have a few questions that I’d like answered though before I get overly excited. My primary concern as I look for a new eCommerce solution is that it be truly enterprise worthy. I know I just pulled out a major buzzword there, but here’s what I mean…these are what I need the software to be, in order of priority:

• Secure You can have the best, fastest, most complete software ever, with so many features it takes days to even comprehend what you have on your computer, but if it’s not secure, it’s worthless. eCommerce software is especially vulnerable to attempted security breaches as it deals with personal information, credit cards, and a high volume of traffic. Your software is only as secure as the rest of the server, of course, which is only secure as the people running it. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. I need the software itself to be free of bugs that allow security violations to happen. You can be the best company in the world and patch the software as soon as a flaw is found, but chances are if you know about the flaw, someone else knew about it before you did. PHP makes me a little nervous, perhaps it’s just a bias but there have been so many cases of PHP software being hacked, not necessarily because of a bug in PHP, but because PHP made it really easy for someone to write some code that they shouldn’t have. Magento will be written for PHP 5, and perhaps that will aid in making it more secure. I will need to do a lot of research, however, before I can truly trust that my eCommerce site running Magento, or any other software for that matter, is secure.

• Speed Speed is second. You can have tons of great features that wow them, but if your site is dog slow you’ll lose tons of sales. I need eCommerce software to be fast, with well optimized database queries and the ability to handle thousands of page loads per minute. We’ll see what ends up happening.

• Features Features are last, not because they aren’t important, but because they aren’t as important. Writing secure and fast software isn’t as glamorous as writing software with a lot of features. On the other hand, in this modern eCommerce world, people get used to new features. Software that adapts to the trends is ideal.

Well, I think I’m done with this long analysis. I’m eagerly awaiting new information, as well as the release of Beta 1 in August! Hopefully it will happen before my vacation!