Thinking about using Magento?

Ok magneto as the potential to be an excellent shopping cart. but their are some things that they need to fix.

First and most importantly is the initial page load. On average its about 250k and takes between 7-9 seconds on a broadband connection. (28 or so seconds for a 56k connection) The reason it takes so long is the javascript they use.

Second,
Seo wise it is not the best. Decent, but it needs some work

last,
If you have a lot of products, magneto is not for yo. it will take you much longer to list a product than pretty much any other shopping cart.

Also, Magento is not really free. Yes you can download and use it for free. However you can not use cheap hosting with it. The reason is the amount of load it puts on the server. If you try to use 1&1 for example, you site will take forever to load and your customer will NOT wait for it.

It's look like you are complaining that your racing car need high quiality gas

There is nothing free in this world. So in case of Magento you pay for good VPS. In case of Oscommerce you pay programmers to modify your store to run better and have all this features that Magento have.

I often see VPS servers being promoted for ecommerce websites, but truthfully, that is rarely a good solution. A VPS often has more limited server resources, considering there are typically multiple VPS' per server. Each VPS takes up a dedicated segment of server resources, and then within those limited resources, you have to have your HTTP, SQL, Email, and other service, running. That often results in barely any resources left over.

A VPS is fine if you have a small site with low traffic, but it typically can turn into a situation where shared hosting is a better solution, and a dedicated server an even better solution.

Regarding Magento's SEO solution, last I saw, they allowed multiple paths to the same page, which can result in duplicate content within your own website (not always penalized, but is something to avoid).

And yes, magento is pretty slow.

Those are all reasons why I do not use magento for serious ecommerce solutions.

I have never used magento myself, but I have heard nothing but complaints and issues with it on other forums. If this is any gauge then I would stear clear of it.

Did you look at a Drupal solution? Either the e-commerce or the Ubercart modules?

e-commerce is only compatible with the Drupal 5.x branch (the version for the 6.x branch is still in development).

Ubercart has a version compatible with the Drupal 6.x branch (a beta version but already pretty stable) and the Ubercart community is very active.

i am in the process of deciding on an ecommerce package. i would like to get some more information on magento. can you tell me what forums you saw the negative reviews on magneto?

thanks

Performance: There’s been widespread complaints about the performance of the application. Slow page loads and response times can be deadly for eCommerce merchants. Now whether this is due to Magento itself, the zend (php) framework it’s built upon, or due to crappy code (which I highly doubt) is not yet determined, but regardless of why it happens, performance trumps all and I won’t be happy until it is able to run smooth and sleek. Now, there’s been some movement on that front - some of the Magento partner hosts have come up with server configurations to maximize the performance of the application. Host Crucial now offers Magento containers - basically a virtualized server environment with more resource allocation and less sites per server (10). Running some basic tests on their demo environment performance seems better than we’ve seen in other hosted environments. But, at $80-$100 per month, we’re talking a pretty serious investment from a hosting standpoint - especially for a PHP based “open source” software which traditionally has the lowest costs of any eCommerce technology (free software, cheap hosting, community based support). When it comes to hosting though, its value should not be underestimated, but the expectation needs to be set that this will not perform well on a traditional “cheap” PHP hosting account where other open source solutions work just fine (within limits, obviously more traffic requires more resources).

I have just used magento to launch an online flooring supply shop and I have to say I am very pleased with the results. I agree with those that say it is a little slow loading pages but this is the same for my competitors websites too, so I am not too concern. If you visit the magento forum there are lots of people to help with advice. I would say SEO wise it is good because of the way you import products each one is well optomised. We have had great initial success let's hope it continues

I use Magento and can say that it is well worth it. I'm using shared hosting and the performance hasn't been bad at all. It took me a while to get a good handle on it, but at this point, I can get it to do pretty much anything I want it to do. I don't think any shopping cart is perfect right out the box, so it requires some diligence to appreciate it for what it is.