Magento Shopping Cart Review - Is it right for you?
Is Magento Commerce the right shopping cart for you? This post presents what I’ve found and asks others to add to this knowledge to provide a helpful resource for those who are considering using the Magento shopping cart.
What is Magento Commerce Shopping Cart?
Magento is the newest shopping cart in the “open source shopping cart” category. This category had been dominated by OS Commerce and Zen Cart (and Virtumart for existing Joomla sites). Magento’s release has created quite a buzz, and I understand that many developers are creating plugins for this new platform.
The “buzz” before Magento was released in May of 2008 was that Magento would provide a high-end, professional shopping cart to the masses for free. So far, people continue to be amazed by Magento.
Magento Shopping Cart Example
You can see an example of a Magento shopping cart at Mobile Edge. I found this by the link from a post by Simple Helix here. The Magento screencasts also show many of the Magento shopping cart features.
Magento Problems: Slow Performance
Magento is rich with features only found in the best shopping cart scripts. But these features appear to come at a cost to performance. The main criticism of Magento are focused on Magento’s slow performance when stores offer thousands of products on a shared hosting plan. That is, Magento appears to requires a lot of server resources to run, which in turn, adds additional expense to using Magento.
Example. For example, they tag cloud feature has been reported to take over a minute to load, since it is pulling keywords from all the products. Similarly, the searches have taken over a minute for large catalogs of products. I presume this will be fixed soon as Magento improves its indexing. Waiting over a minute for visitors to search will cause most vistors to cancel the search and move on. That is not tolerable for any etailer.
Small Merchants. Performance issues shouldn’t be a problem for very small online merchants, since these etailers aren’t offering many products.
Performance Fixes. The Magento community has been discussing Magento performance issues. Magento is working on its performance issues and has made improvements with Magento’s recent release. Magento’s website says that performance is a key focus for future releases.
If you host your own server, there are a number of tips to get Magento to run faster.
Magento Installation
To install Magento, you may find this Magento installation tutorial useful.
Other Magento Commerce Reviews
I will be posting Magento Commerce reviews that I find here:
- Is Magento worthy of the hype? In short, yes.
- Magento has a lot better SEO capabilities than OScommerce, which is a huge deal to me.
- Magento Pros and Cons
- Magento is by far one of the more exciting e-commerce platforms available for free on the market today (open source shopping carts compared)
Your Review or Opinion of Magento
What do you think of Magento Commerce shopping cart? If you have experience with it, please add your impressions, feedback, or advice in a comment here.
the problem with slow performance is now fixed, you can use magento easily