As an agency specialising in building and marketing e-commerce sites, we spend a lot of time helping clients navigate the tricky journey to selecting the most suitable e-commerce platform for their businesses…

With such a wide variety of options available – and so many conflicting, divided opinions – the decision is often a fraught one, with the choice forming the foundation of your entire e-commerce strategy for years to come.

Here, we look specifically at the pros and cons of Magento. This is now the e-commerce CMS we use for the majority of our clients, so the conclusion is a positive one.

However, we lean towards Magento as a result of many years’ experience working with almost every e-commerce CMS available. This article explains the experiences, the pros and cons that we’ve encountered over the years with Magento and the thought processes which should inform the choice of any organisation considering using what has become the world’s most-popular e-commerce platform.

 

OPEN SOURCE VS. PROPRIETARY / BESPOKE SYSTEMS

The very first consideration we have when selecting an appropriate e-commerce platform with a client is whether it’s to be an open source one or a proprietary / bespoke-built platform.

Open source software is that for which the source code is freely, publicly and globally available to all. It is not ‘owned’ solely by one particular organisation and it can be distributed, amended and used by anyone – free of charge. Examples of open source software systems and languages include WordPress, Magento, MySQL, Apache and PHP.

This is in contrast to proprietary systems, which have been developed by an individual or organisation who retains the ownership of the source code – and typically sells licenses to use it (think Windows, Photoshop, Apple IOS and so on).

When it comes to e-commerce CMS platforms, there is a range of free open source options, a selection of large ‘enterprise’ licensed systems and then a massive array of bespoke-built proprietary systems, often developed by one particular agency or individual.

The seriously large, enterprise scale licensed systems are really the domain of big retailers. Systems like Demandware or Hybris for instance come with six-figure license fees and above.

Unless you are looking at a top-end enterprise solution like that, our experience – and that of many organisations we’ve dealt with – is that proprietary, bespoke website platforms written and owned by one single organisation are to be avoided.

Proprietary software systems leave the fate of your online business entirely in the hands of the person or company that wrote and owns your website system. If that organisation or person disappears, goes bankrupt, wins the lottery, loses interest or has a falling out with you, there’s no-one else in the world who can take over your site and help you with it. You’re permanently wedded to them – through the good times and the bad – and that is generally a high risk situation to be in, particularly if your website is a critical arm of your business.

Bear in mind also that with a proprietary system, you do not own the rights to the IP of your website. There may be some terms and conditions that state you own the design or front-end coding – but the underlying architecture of your site remains the intellectual property of the developer who licensed it to you.

This is perhaps no problem if you have a small and fairly inconsequential website – but if your site is a major part of your business (or is likely to become one), you may feel uncomfortable with the fact you are not the legal owner of it. With open source, you own your own instance of the software and have full access to and ownership of the source code yourself.

Open source software (e.g. Magento Community Edition) puts you in a far less risky situation and avoids having all your eggs in one basket. You’ll find they have a community of developers around the world who are familiar with them and can provide support if needed. In most cases, one Magento developer or agency can take over a site built by another without any problem. Open source systems like Magento are generally built in standardised ways that make moving them between developers pretty straightforward.

Another big benefit of open source systems is the continual upgrade path. Bespoke e-commerce CMS’s are often developed by small organisations or sometimes lone individuals who cannot always be relied upon to provide continual updates to their software.

This might be in the form of security updates when vulnerabilities arise or general enhancements and improvements to the software. Open Source software (including Magento) is regularly upgraded and improved – in much the same way as the operating system or apps on your phone get updates – both in response to security threats and with new functionality and feature improvements.

Finally on the subject of open source vs proprietary, we have seen several occasions where clients’ sites have grown so successfully they bring the management and development of their sites in-house, employing their own web developer.

If you ever find yourself in that situation, you’ll discover it’s much easier to recruit a developer familiar with open source platforms like Magento than it is to find one who then has to learn a proprietary or bespoke-built system from scratch.

 

OPEN SOURCE CMS OPTIONS

Magento is one of many open source e-commerce platforms on the market – including solutions like X-cart, Prestashop, Opencart, OScommerce – among many others. All of these benefit from the advantages of open source explained above, but they vary in their popularity and functionality.

OScommerce was once the industry-standard, but fell out of favour as its functionality and user-friendliness were usurped by competing systems which offered more flexibility and a better user experience.

In recent years, WooCommerce, which is an e-commerce extension to WordPress (the world’s most-popular CMS platform) has emerged as a dominant force – and the only one of the current crop of open source systems that can claim to rival Magento in terms of overall market share.

WooCommerce has a superb range of features and functionality with a very user-friendly ‘back end’ admin system. This, as with many of its other rivals, is relatively easy to set up and develop with compared to Magento – and provides a fairly quick route to launching an e-commerce store with few complexities.

 

HOSTED E-COMMERCE SOLUTIONS

An alternative to either licensed or open source systems is the selection of online ‘hosted’ e-commerce platforms. These are web-based ‘build your own e-commerce site’ systems, which require no hosting or installation – you simply create an account on the provider’s site and your website is instantly created, ready for you to customise and add your products.

Systems like Shopify, BigCommerce and Volusion fall in to this category and provide users with a very quick and simple way to launch their own e-commerce sites. The functionality and flexibility of these systems is improving all the time and Shopfiy, which is emerging as a dominant force among hosted solutions, has some superb examples of beautiful, user-friendly e-commerce sites that have been created by people with no technical web expertise at all.

Hosted e-commerce systems typically charge a monthly subscription fee – and sometimes a % transaction fee. They take away a huge amount of the hassle and development work required when building an e-commerce site and are a great option for a small or completely brand-new startup e-commerce business.

There are a couple of drawbacks of these systems though, which often make them unsuitable for larger scale or more serious e-commerce strategies.

One major such disadvantage is the fact that your site is never actually ‘your’ site – it is entirely the property of, and fully controlled by, the software company. Your site’s existence is entirely in the hands of the platform and they can do with it whatever they choose at any time.

Most of the time, this poses no problem – but a prime example of where this can be a major issue comes from Magento’s own attempt to enter this market with their hosted ‘Magento Go’ system.

Thousands of store owners had self-built Magento Go websites successfully trading when Magento was bought by eBay – who then decided to close down the service. Magento Go store owners received an email warning and, months later, the entire system was closed down – leaving all Magento Go store owners scrambling to have their sites re-built on a new platform.

At least with a bespoke-built or proprietary system, you generally have the option of hosting it independently of the original developer, even if it is then un-supported. But with a hosted solution, if that company closes down or goes in a different direction, your site is gone with no method of redress.

The other big drawback to hosted solutions is lack of flexibility. Although you can customise layout and functionality to varying degrees, you remain restricted by the limitations and boundaries of the system. There is no option to build upon, customise or extend such systems beyond the boundaries of what they can already do. In the majority of cases, for small businesses this poses no problem – and these solutions offer a great way to get started with e-commerce at a low cost with very low barriers to entry. But for anything more serious than a start-up or lifestyle business, a hosted solution is not the way to go.

 

WHERE MAGENTO FITS IN…

Magento positions itself as a mid-market system, filling the space between the entry-level solutions described above and the top-end enterprise systems mentioned earlier. Indeed, at the time of writing, there is no other major competitor e-commerce platform that services this market – which is why Magento has become so dominant and in-demand in recent years.

For anyone launching a small start-up store, Magento is likely to prove overkill for those requirements. It’s a big, powerful system with thousands of features that many small businesses might never even touch. As a result, the development and infrastructure overhead is relatively high (compared with the entry-level options) often making it un-economical for very small e-commerce operations.

The ‘Enterprise’ version of Magento comes with a license fee between £15k and £20k (Community Edition is free) so even this isn’t aimed at competing with the very top-end of the enterprise market.

We’ll typically recommend Magento to retailers who are looking to turnover anything from around £500k per year online up to £20-million+ either immediately or in the medium-term future. Anything below this and a more entry-level system is likely to be more appropriate, unless you have specific technical requirements that Magento is better suited to.

 

3RD PARTY INTEGRATIONS

One big area where Magento excels over the other open source systems is integration with external software. As an e-commerce business grows, it becomes frequently more necessary for the website to integrate and automate with other systems and processes.

For instance synchronising stock level data with an ERP system, customer behaviour data with a marketing platform like DotMailer or customer account data with a system like Sage or SAP. The ability for Magento to integrate with an enormous range of third-party systems, whether it be through existing Magento ‘extensions’ or directly-written API integrations really sets it apart from any other system on the market.

When considering a new e-commerce platform, you need to envisage how your site will grow over the course of 3 to 5 years or more. If you experience even a vague degree of success, you’re very likely to need the website to integrate and talk to another system – be it ERP, courier, accounting, fulfilment, warehouse management, CRM – or something else.

Achieving this with any of the other entry-level solutions, or with a bespoke-built system, or with a hosted platform is likely to be much more unlikely than with Magento, which is perfectly-suited for extension and integration of this nature.

 

MARKET SHARE

Consider also Magento’s share of the e-commerce market. At the time of writing, Magento is estimated to comprise just under 30% of the total number of e-commerce sites on the web, with WordPress’s WooCommerce platform in second place at 24%. So these two open source systems are, between them, powering over half the e-commerce websites on the internet (Data from Aheadworks).

Why should this matter? We believe it’s important for three reasons: One is the fact there’s ‘safety in numbers’… Software that is so widely and prevalently used is likely to be around for the long term. It’s less likely to be superseded by other technologies or become abandoned and obsolete at any time in the near future.

The dominance of Magento and WooCommerce is causing some of the other e-commerce platforms to lose market share – and it’s a risky strategy to hang the future of your online business on a platform that’s in decline (just ask any retailer now left with an Actinic or OScommerce site).

Secondly, these systems are on the rise and so dominant for a reason – because they are good! Software and technology isn’t typically adopted so prevalently unless it’s satisfying the needs of its users. If it wasn’t effective and doing a good job for the people using it, it wouldn’t be recommended and re-used so widely. Magento has become the dominant e-commerce platform because it is widely seen as the best at what it does.

Thirdly, market share is an important factor in your e-commerce platform choice because it indicates how widely supported the system is. We’ve already discussed the importance of being able to move your website around to other providers or to bring development in-house – and with the world’s most-popular system, there is always going to be a wide community of developers and agencies around who are familiar with it and can help support you.

It’s also worth bearing in mind the type of organisations that use Magento to power their e-commerce sites. Magento boast an impressive list of major retailers on their website including names like Mothercare, Olympus Cameras, Paul Smith – and many more.

If names like these are happy to entrust their online retail strategies to the Magento platform, this is a good sign to smaller organisations that the system is up to the job. And all the features and functionality available to those brands are available straight out of the box to anyone else using the system.

 

ENTERPRISE vs. COMMUNITY EDITION

There are two versions of Magento: Enterprise (including the new Enterprise Cloud edition) and Community Edition (CE). Community Edition is the free version, available for anyone to download, install and develop however they like – with full access to the source code and no license fees at all. With Community Edition, the only costs you’ll face are the costs to host your site, the fees you pay to a developer to design and build your site – and potentially some small costs for add-on ‘extension’ software that might be used to enhance the site.

Since Magento was acquired by eBay, the organisation has had more of a commercial focus – and is now pushing its paid-for Enterprise edition harder. There are relatively few substantial differences between the two versions – the main ones being centred around speed enhancements and improved technical support. The vast majority of functionality available in the Enterprise edition is available to CE users.

As discussed further below, Magento has a reputation for being very resource-hungry on the server, making it slow if not properly set up and optimised. The Enterprise version has enhancements that improve its performance ‘out of the box’, making it naturally faster. Users also have the benefit of direct access to Magento’s technical support team.

However with annual licensing costs of around £15k and above, these benefits don’t make a compelling case for everyone – particularly retailers at the smaller end of the market. If you’re using an agency to design, build and support your site, the Magento technical support should be un-necessary, as your technical support will be provided by your agency anyway.

As long as your chosen Magento developer knows what they’re doing, the speed issues should also not be a problem – as a Magento site that’s built and optimised for speed – especially if it’s hosted on a Magento-optimised server platform – will be as quick as any out-of-the-box Enterprise site. The caveat here is to ensure you’re using experienced Magento developers – ideally Magento certified – who will already be familiar with the resource requirements and speed optimisation needed to make Magento work lightning fast.

Our advice to most clients is that for a site expected to turn over anything below £5-million per-year, Community Edition is perfectly adequate. If you’re at a scale greater than this, it may be worth considering Enterprise – but we have yet to see arguments that are particularly compelling as to the material benefits of Enterprise over Community Edition for most clients.

 

MAGENTO CONNECT EXTENSIONS LIBRARY

One of the great benefits of open source software is the fact it is designed to be extended upon and integrated with. Magento – and the other dominant open source CMS WordPress – have huge ‘extension’ or ‘plugin’ libraries full of bolt-on software that can be added to provide extra features and enhancements.

Developers are free to create ‘modules’ that they can either give away for free or sell (typically for fairly nominal fees) on the Magento ‘Connect’ extension marketplace. This means that, very often, functionality that isn’t available with the core system, and might otherwise need complex custom development, can be achieved by simply installing an extension.

And with Magento’s continuing dominance in the e-commerce market, more and more software vendors are writing Magento extensions for their systems, which make integrations more straightforward. A huge number of ERP, warehouse management, marketing, accounting and fulfilment software developers now write Magento extensions to allow their users to integrate with their websites.

Open source plugin libraries aren’t always 100% full of completely reliable, quality extensions – and Magento Connect is no exception. There are risks that come with using third-party modules. For instance, there’s no standard governing the quality of coding submitted to the libraries, meaning some modules may not work exactly as expected once installed.

Also, some extensions may conflict with the code in other extensions, causing failures in one or both. It is also important to limit the number of extensions used to the absolute bare minimum – because each one adds extra processing demands on the server, potentially slowing the site down.

These disadvantages are far outweighed by the advantages of having such an extensible system though. As long as your web developer understands the implications of extension use – and chooses extensions wisely, testing them fully, there should be no problem.

Every extension on Magento Connect has options for reviews and ratings – so it quickly becomes clear which are the best quality – and these rise to the top at the expense of those where the feedback is less good.

Consider for instance the likely time and cost overhead of having to write a direct integration between your website and, for instance, your Sage accounts system – one which transmits customer account data both ways, stock level data and order details between both systems. Such work could be many £thousands and weeks of work.

With Magento, an extension (indeed many) exists that can simply be downloaded, installed and configured with the CMS that eradicates the need for all that complex, bespoke programming. Open source software – and Magento in particular – is driving down the costs and barriers to enterprise-scale e-commerce and making functionality that was only previously available to major corporations available to everyone.

 

DRAWBACKS OF MAGENTO

Even with a system so popular and advanced as Magento, not everything can ever be 100% perfect – and Magento does have some drawbacks which put some people off.

Firstly, there’s the size and complexity of the system – something many developers find daunting on their first outing with Magento. To be clear, the administration from the retailer’s point of view is perfectly user-friendly and intuitive – so complexity isn’t an issue here. But for a web developer – particularly one who’s new to Magento, configuring and building a Magento site can be a challenge.

Unlike some ‘lighter weight’ platforms (WooCommerce for instance, which is a superbly easy setup job for even a junior web developer), Magento is a bit of a ‘big beast’ and requires some pretty high level development and programming knowledge even just to install a basic instance of the CMS on a server.

From there, understanding how to properly build and integrate HTML code and optimise a site for high speed performance is a challenge first (and even second and third) time around. As a result, many developers get instantly put off and write off Magento as being too much hard work.

Speak to any seasoned Magento developer and almost all will tell a horror story of their first ever Magento project and how it either took too long to build, failed technically, crashed on launch – and so on. Very few get it right first time. But those who persist – and who follow tried and tested development methodologies – are rewarded.

For this reason, always question the credentials of any developer you consider entrusting with a Magento build – ensuring you see plenty of examples of their past work. Any developer who admits yours is to be their first foray with Magento (or who you suspect might not have the experience to back up their claims) should be avoided unless you’re willing to take on the roller-coaster journey of a first ever Magento site with them!

Another well-documented, but slightly misguided, issue with Magento is, as already touched upon above, its speed and performance. Magento sites can be notoriously slow – but only if they’re not built and optimised properly. Any Magento site that runs slowly has not been built and optimised in the way that an experienced Magento developer would know how.

A combination of a poor installation, inadequate server resources and excessive use of plugin extensions will all combine to slow the performance of a Magento site down. If you then add to that mix a half-decent level of traffic, you’ll have even bigger problems with the site slowing and crashing.

However, if built, hosted and configured properly, there is no reason at all why a Magento site should run any slower than any other system.

Remember, it’s a very feature-rich, comprehensive system and all that in-built functionality is bound to place a heavy load on a server. But the big retail names – and thousands of smaller businesses – using Magento wouldn’t possibly tolerate poor performance from their websites. Their sites are built by experienced Magento developers who know how to optimise them for fast-running. Make sure yours is too!

One frequent accusation levelled at open source software of any kind is that it’s vulnerable to security issues. This is undeniably true – but it’s true of virtually any software system on the market.

Magento, as an e-commerce platform, holds and processes sensitive customer data – including in many cases credit card details – so is naturally a target for hackers. But then so too is your bank account, your PayPal account, your email – and virtually all other web-based systems.

The benefit of a dominant, mass-market system is that if ever a security vulnerability is exposed, there’s massive motivation – and resources – to get it resolved. There is also a huge community of developers testing and attempting to exploit security vulnerabilities for good (i.e. to find and report them before the malicious hackers do). Whenever such a flaw is exposed, a global update is pushed out with security patches to allow all retailers to update their system and resolve the problem.

Compare this with what might happen if hackers exploit a small proprietary CMS developed by one particular agency. There might only be two or three people in their business capable of working on the system, who will suddenly need to re-programme it and issue updates individually to every client running the software, with very little motivation or resource to do so.

 

MAGENTO CERTIFIED DEVELOPERS

The above issues highlight the importance of ensuring you work with an experienced, expert developer or agency. Magento understands its system is complex and has special requirements to ensure it works well, which is why it introduced a rigorous developer certification programme.

Magento developers can undertake extensive training courses run by Magento themselves – and then sit exams in order to gain a recognised qualification.

Unlike many such courses and qualifications, the Magento developer certification is genuinely tough – and few even very experienced Magento developers pass first time. You can generally be pretty safe in the knowledge that, if you’re working with a Magento certified developer, you’re dealing with someone who knows how to combat the kind of Magento difficulties explained above. At Advantec, incidentally, we put all our web developers through the Magento training and certification process.

 

MAGENTO HOSTING

As explained above, we know Magento is a heavy and complex system that’s prone to tripping people up if it’s not built and hosted properly. So the hosting infrastructure for a Magento site is an especially important consideration – particularly if you’re expecting high volumes of traffic.

The decision on where to host a Magento site should never be taken lightly – and it’s rarely a good idea to opt for the kind of high-volume, budget hosting that can be perfectly adequate for something like WordPress or any other lighter-weight CMS.

Hosting companies who have specific Magento credentials are the best option – specifically any who might be a Magento certified hosting partner.

These organisations have hosting technology specifically optimised for Magento – and staff who are trained and experienced in the technicalities of hosting high-performance Magento sites.

Combining a Magento certified developer with a Magento hosting partner should eliminate any of the potential drawbacks explained in the section above – and is the best way to ensure your Magento site is built for optimum performance.

At Advantec, we have experience dealing with several hosting partners and have found the UK arm of Cogeco Peer1 to be of an exceptional standard in terms of technology solutions and technical support expertise.

 

CONCLUSION

Although there is a wide array of e-commerce CMS platforms on the market, almost all of which we’ve tested and used in the past, we have yet to find one that ticks as many boxes as Magento can, for the market at which it’s aimed.

Our advice to completely new or very small retailers is that Magento is quite likely to be overkill for their requirements. The functionality of WooCommerce – or indeed perhaps a hosted system like Shopify – is likely to be perfectly adequate and comes without the technical complexity, higher development costs and hosting infrastructure requirements of Magento. Such systems are ideal for establishing your online business and ‘proving the concept’.

However, for 2nd generation e-commerce sites and beyond (i.e. those who are already established online and looking for the next phase of growth), or for those who have bigger ambitions than a small start-up store, Magento feels like the only real option.

The crop of hosted solutions or the other open source platforms that are declining in market share are not a particularly safe bet for an organisation that’s looking to scale up its e-commerce activity and revenues for the medium to long term.

In terms of ‘mid market’ solution, that’s built to help retailers achieve high-growth, £multi-million e-commerce, there is, in our opinion, no other competing e-commerce platform that matches the functionality and scalability of Magento – especially when combined with the expertise of Magento certified developers and Magento partner hosting agencies. With that approach to your e-commerce platform strategy, you really can’t go wrong!