Magento Review

Magento Community edition is a free open source ecommerce platform that has the power of many of paid shopping carts. It has been said to be one of the fastest growing shopping cart platforms on the market with over 600,000 downloads. We find that believable, but most likely less then a quarter of those who downloaded the platform are actually using it. In summary, Magento is the one of the most customizable and powerful ecommerce platforms available.  However, their shopping cart requires a lot of time on the development and build out stages as well as time spent with maintenance and updates. Most businesses that use Magento successfully are giant online stores that require a very complex and customizable platform. 

Magento is also a resource hog, and you will need a dedicated hosting solution to avoid the slowness issues caused by the complex database. In our review, and with our disucssions with many different ecommerce developers we've found there to be a steep learning curve to building a site using Magento. So if your considering building a Magento website yourself, you may want to rethink that option and hire a professional firm that knows the intricacies and in's and outs of their system (or use another ecommerce platform).  Despite all this if you have the capital/time to set up, design, host and or learn building a site in their platform, you will find a powerful and customizable shopping cart solution. Read on for our full review below and should you need help with the development or SEO of your Magento storefront, you should contact us by clicking here (we do that).

Our Magento SEO Review

Magento is fairly search engine friendly right from the get go. While there are a improvements you can do to fully maximize your SEOness, here are some of SEO friendly features that come packed with Magento out of the gate.

• Features a built in URL re-write tool which is absolutely necessary for SEO
• XML Site Map Generation
• Custom Meta Titles
• Custom Meta Descriptions
• Custom Default Meta Data
• Choice of URL name separator either “_” or “ – “
• Well thought out site architecture which is easily crawlable by search engine robots
• Easy to make product feeds for Google Shopping
• Enabling the caching of category and product pages

It does have some lacking features but nothing you couldn’t be able to fix on your own since it is an open source platform and you will have access to the host and all the Magento files. For one you will need to alter your htaccess file to redirect the non www to www. You will also need to set up canonical tags on your pages because Magento is notorious for creating duplicate pages, sometimes as many as four different version of the page for the same product.

Magento Key Features Review

Magento has an extensive list of features, more than many users will need, but that is a good thing. Here is a short list of some of they key features of Magneto shopping cart Image zoom

• Side by side product comparisons
• Advanced pricing options
• Inventory Management
• Multiple store fronts in one admin panel and product catalog
• 3rd Party API integration
• Integrated Google Website Optimizer
• Highly flexible coupons
• URL Rewriting
• Up-sell options during the checkout process
• Integration with multiple shipping carriers
• Customer Reviews
• Over 50 Payment Gateways integrated

Magento Designing & Development Review

This is going to be overwhelming for even the most experienced web developers, using their platform is like learning a whole new coding language.  Just the sheer size and amount of template files is going to turn a lot of people off. There are over 250 template files that can be themed. Basically, if you are going to tackle the design of Magento you are going to need to invest a lot of time learning the structure and hierarchy of the software. Learning about “structural blocks”, “content blocks”, “layouts” and “templates”, what they do how they work is pretty intensive. We recommend you hire a Magento developer with previous experience, such as us for example,  (shameless self plug here).

Final Thoughts on Magento

Magento is a robust ecommerce software that is more suited for mid level businesses doing at least 10 million in sales yearly, that have the resources to invest in this software. While the allure of a free open source application that is feature rich and can compete with many of the high end shopping carts out there, small business owners and people who are looking to set up a store as a hobby need to stay away from this software unless they feel like dropping a serious investment into it. The fact that you can have multiple store fronts that are all managed by the same product database and admin make this a very good option for seasoned ecommerce business owners who want to create multiple websites and identities.