Magento is an e-commerce platform that is touted as being one of the best solutions for online merchants. There are several versions, notably the Community edition, which is free and the Enterprise version which costs about $17k per year for a license. As most developers know, the Community edition has a number of significant limitations. As for technical support, you’re more or less on your own. Magento is a very complicated e-commerce system with files and coding that will make your head spin. Configurations must be made that may present significant challenges to casual coders and those used to working exclusively with GUI’s. Add to all this the frustration of multiple glitches and bad extensions. Most likely at some point, you may be considering replacing Magento with something much easier to work with.
Working with the Enterprise edition is also not as easy as you might think. Though it does come with Magento Support, sometimes it’s the luck of the draw as to which support rep you end up with. Some are quite good while others are prone to quick, inaccurate answers, as if they don’t wish to be bothered. After a recent, clean install of the latest Magento EE release, exactly as outlined in their documentation, our team experienced serious glitches. Four days later we’re still working with Magento Support to find out why the bugs in this world class e-commerce system would prevent us from doing things that much less costly carts seem to handle quite easily. There is a lot of tinkering. Sometimes things like extensions or updates can wreak havoc upon the system. Frequent backups are recommended. Applying the many critical security patches can also be a pain as they must be applied by SSH rather than via a GUI. Not a quick and easy solution, by any means.
The selling point for Magento Enterprise is the flexibility it offers for custom coding, etc. While that may be true, the key word here is “enterprise”. Unless your company is doing tens of thousands in sales and you have the resources to employ a full time Magento team of designers and expert programmers, you’re going to have a struggle on your hands. Magento’s website support resources are not all that helpful either. It’s sometimes hard to find what you want and some material tends to wander into technobabble.
Magento is a fussy, expensive and bloated application which eats up a lot of resources. You must constantly empty caches and trim wherever you can, as load time can be slow. To sum it all up, Magento is like a supermodel. Both of which require a lot of attention, financial support, and can be fussy and demanding. Magento has the resources to look great (when it’s working at it’s optimal best), and has a lot of flexibility, BUT all this comes at a cost in money and technical support. So be aware of what you’re getting into with Magento. If you have the money and resources to work with all it’s quirks and requirements, you’ll probably be fine. If you’re a smaller company with limited resources, you would probably be better off looking for a less demanding e-commerce solution.
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