I will be building an e-commerce site for a client (professional looking) and am looking for an e-commerce program that offers the following: * available premium templates with great support * international payment options * not buggy * easy to use I was thinking about Magento, but I've noticed a lot of negative sentiment to the program recently. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks, Mike
from my short experience of using and researching magento has found that it is indeed a very powerful ecommerce script, however it needs a dedicated box to run it (or VPS) you can not run magento on shared hosting. it will run very slowly and i believe this is where a lot of negative comments about magento come from. if you provide it with the power it needs, it is very much worth while.
I'll not prefer to use Magento if your requirements are not much higher. It'll be very expensive and also need a very good high configured server.
dissapointed , because I too was hoping to use Magento. So I was wondering how exactly do you know if your hosting is on a dedicated or shared server? Is there any way of finding out this information? I've installed a test server for Magento, and it is slow with only 6 products.
it is easy to know if you are on dedicated or shared hosting. if you have a simple hosting plan through hostgator or godaddy etc and only pay around the $10 per month then it is shared hosting. if you have rented a dedicated box or a VPS host then it is dedicated. Dedicated and VPS will set you back quite a bit more per month.
Magento is the best opensource ecommerce software and it is emerging as a market leader in ecommerce. You can check the trends at http://ecommerce.pixelcrayons.com/knowledge-base/magento-emerging-star-of-ecommerce-race/
I love magento, but there is a huge learning cuve to modifying the script and design... i'd be ready to do your homework and plan on spending many hours pulling your hair out.
lol , correct Yes, magento is a bit hard, but if you have enough resource like good server then its worth.
Honestly, if your client is just starting off you shouldn't suggest Mageneto. When something requires a VPS they're basically saying it's for high-volume usage only, so unless they've got a big advertising budget it just doesn't make sense. Growth in business is a slow, grinding process, and the last thing you need in the very beginning is to flush money down the drain.