According to Google Trends, it’s official. More people are are searching for “Magento” than “osCommerce”. And it didn’t take long. Less than two years.
I noticed it a little over a year ago and kept watch. It was in beta at the time and I wasn’t about to switch our active sites over to it until I was sure the software would still be around. Most of the software we had looked at was not worth switching to. And I had tried about everything. We had even purchased one shopping cart system with hope that it would do the job we wanted and it didn’t. All the features we wanted had to be built in or be able to be added with extensions or it was just not worth making the change.
And with over 750,000 downloads, Magento more than stuck around. It is now the most popular open source e-Commerce solution around and no longer in beta. So I decided to make the change.
Why Magento?
Magento is a complex beast. That being said, a lot of the features that you normally would have to hire a programmer to add in are already built into the software.
- Coupons and discounts – And tier pricing and free shipping.
- Google Analytics – As easy as pasting in your Google site id and clicking a button.
- Google Website Optimizer integration – Split test your landing pages.
- An Extensible API – Forget importing orders or typing them up. Connect to your site remotely.
- Complex products with attributes – One of the type of products I have added to a site consisted of a bundle or three mix or match parts and each of the parts had seven possible configurations.
- One click upgrades, extension installs and theme installs – Wordpress doesn’t even have remote theme installs yet.
- One installation can control multiple sites – Whether you want a Spanish and English version of your site or a high-end and low-end version of your site, Magento will comply.
- Integration with UPS, USPS, Fedex and DHL – No updating of shipping prices and tables.
- Easy SEO – Google sitemaps and full controls of URL rewrites.
- Multiple themes – Need a theme to run just during the Christmas season? Set the dates and forget about it. Magento will do the rest.
- User generated content – Built in tagging, reviews and ratings.
And there is much, much more. And if you need more features than what Magento comes with, there is Magento Connect which houses extensions that will add even more functionality to Magento. And because Magento is open source, new extensions show up all the time. As the community grows bigger, the chances that you will find the extension you need right away gets better.
Learn More About Magento
As I said, Magento has a lot more built in features that I could list here. You can read about more of the features here.
Magneto also has very specific server requirements, which you can read about here.
While Magento comes SEO ready, there are still some tweaks that could make it better. One of the issues I noticed off the bat was that a site with only 1000 products may have 20 times the amount of pages. But a recent article on Magento SEO will help a lot with that and other SEO related issues.
While there is a book on developing for Magento and a new one coming out soon on using Magento, the Magento forum is the best place to ask questions and get answers. I have bookmarked over 60 threads there and most of the modifications I have done to Magento installations would not have been possible without the information I found there.
Is it a choice for you?
This was not meant to be an article to sell Magento to you. Everyone has there own preferences and needs. But after hitting dead ends with other e-Commerce platforms, it was the right choice for the company and clients I work for.
Magento does have specific server requirements. It is probably not best to run it on a shared server and it needs custom settings for PHP. There are some issues with the SEO. And it does have a serious learning curve if you are a developer or designer working with Magento. There will also be a learning curve for employees using the software, as there is with any change. Technology that does a lot on the frontend requires work on the backend.
And there will be growing pains. After I built my first Magento site, I wasn’t so sure about my decision. It’s structure is not comparable to any other CMS or shopping cart software out there. And in a lot of ways, I could compare it to first learning PHP. But 4 sites later, I was sure my decision was right and the structure started to make sense.
Like anything new, you must put the effort in to get it to work for you.
Hi Stephan, nice article, and thanks for the link!!
Very good article, thanks.
I think I’ll give Magento a try with my next drop shipping site I try. I’ve been using Prestashop which imho has got a ways to go.
Thanks Stephan. It is interesting to watch companies grow, especially when you have vested interest. Ecommerce is hotter than ever.
Thanks everyone. Magento is definitely worth a try and with Joost’s article, even a better choice.
Are you worried at all about the security risks with using an open source shopping cart? From what I’ve heard they might have trouble continuing to operate if new regulations / PCI compliance standards come down.
One product dies, another is born. It’s evolution.
Thanks for the interesting article. There is nothing more to say…
Magento is currently PCI compliant or could be easily configured to be: http://www.magentocommerce.com/company/pci-compliance . I have heard this “open source = security risk” many times and am not sure of the logic. Yes, if software is open source, security risks are visible to anyone who wants to find them to exploit them or, the important part, to fix them. But if it is closed source, only the company that develops the software can fix security issues. I have yet to meet a software company that has more developers than an open source community. After all, Windows is not open source and there have been a few security risks with that software.
The difficulty in meeting the PCI standards is probably less of a concern than the cost to do so, which, from what I’ve been told, can be outrageous.
Why compare Magento to osCommerce at all?
Why not compare it to CRE Loaded or Zen Cart for that matter? Why osCommerce?
Because Magento is just osCommerce rewritten with its Add Ons built in. And because the son has to try and defeat the father in order to feel like a man.
osCommerce is 10 years old next year and jsut released V3.0. Magento is 2. I say “grow up”.
Mainly because osCommerce was the most popular open source shopping cart software available. It is only valid to compare Magento to it. And I have developed a few osCommerce sites as well. They are about as different in construction as could be, in no way similar. They are two different animals.
I have been looking around for some training or study course for ecommerce related subjects. I came across this one at “ecommerce dot skillstrain dot co dot uk” (link on name). if there is these software packages available for this, then what would be the point of the course? any suggestions?
I have been developing in oscommerce software for 6 years. Stephen, magento is a nice platform, but it will not fit the majority of the small site owners out there. It IS resource intensive and you can’t run it on a shared environment on any platform. This hinders the potential to market to those site owners use to shared hosting. Oscommerce still has a larger community and magento will probably not even come close to that due to the fact that oscommerce is still the #1 ecommerce platform out there. just because you gain in searches does not justify that a certain platform will be more popular. Varien is doing alot of marketing, but the searches versus, downloads does not show enough analysis of how much of those downloads are nothing more then inspecting the software. There is not many sites out there with magento yet, it will take YEARS to get anywhere near oscommerce as far as popular enough to be used worldwide on all server platforms. The main problem with magento is that it uses too much server resources still and it has a long way to go before it will even be acceptable for shared hosting account owners, which IS the majority of small businesses. I know magento very well as we have been paying attention to it as well, but for the next 2 years at least, it is still too soon for that platform to take over any oscommerce based site until ALL of the issues are resolved with its performance and other api issues. for now, magento is a good platform to play around with until it morphs naturally to be one of the best carts to be made. Although we do tend to taylor to oscommerce variants and know the software very well, this opinion is just from what we observed. One of the most important things to watch for is if alot of users download something with high end download numbers, watch out, it might just be a 1 hit wonder. Just some thoughts. Time will tell. We will not be offering magento just yet, maybe in 2 years. Jim
I agree – many small site owners would still rather stick to oscommerce. Though you can not deny the fact that thousands of people find magento the best solution for their stores.
If you also want to switch to magento you may take a look at cart2cart online service. It automates data migration fm your shopping cart to magento http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com
I was fine with oscommerce until I ran into a lot of custom sites I had to build and most of the features I needed were built into Magento. Most oscommerce addons have to be cut and pasted into the default files, making any sort of rollback or core update a mess.
And yes, Magento doesn’t work well with shared hosting, but a dedicated host, for many companies, would be one of their smallest monthly expenses.