Author Topic: Magento vs Woocommerce  (Read 54829 times)

I, Brian

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Magento vs Woocommerce
« on: April 04, 2012, 10:48:41 PM »
Am getting so pissed off with Magento, even though I'm supposed to be only a couple of days from launching the shop.

The whole software is designed to be as user-unfriendly as possible, so that you need to pay for support to get anything working right.

Latest debacle - developers installed Magento 1.5 with the theme I was wanting to use. Looking to upgrade to Magento 1.6 and it looks like f###ing brain surgery.

I can't make any edits to Magento without having to pay someone, not even for basic template tweaks. It was a steep enough curve learning to use Magento because it's just so retentive.

Maybe time to download Woocommerce and see what happens with that. If works, may have to resign myself to copy/pasting products over from one install to the other, seeing as there's no exporter product images.

Figured better to stay with Magento because in the long term it appeared to be be the more professional solution - but it's a hulking piece of sh## that needs a specialist to make basic tweaks.

Nnnghh!!

Just a rant, I guess. :)

DrCool

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2012, 11:04:55 PM »
I installed a test version of Magento just to play around with and it seemed pretty cumbersome. If you have a huge shop with 20,000 skus or something along those lines I could see it being useful but for a smaller shop I just can't see it.

Have you looked at some of the smaller carts like Volusion or 3Dcart? Both of those seem to be pretty decent. Also Magento has their MagentoGo program which seems to be a bit easier to work with.

jetboy

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2012, 11:11:48 PM »
Magento seems to be an increasingly popular requirement in web developer ads nowadays. Even though it may not be the easiest thing to work with, the fact there is support out there can't be a bad thing. Take this from someone who's all too often picked technology that was really elegant, but lost out to something else with a better support infrastructure. See Textpattern vs. Wordpress, Mootools vs. jQuery etc.

Rooftop

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #3 on: April 05, 2012, 12:44:54 PM »
IBrian- what is it about it that is so difficult to work with? We're considering moving towards using it more.  A lot of the complaints I have seen are from people not used to working in a more object orientated way and with MVC in particular.  These are big plusses for me, so I am trying to figure out what the hurdles might be.

NoBeard

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #4 on: April 06, 2012, 09:32:51 AM »
We were considering using Magento but the cost put us of from wanting to try it out and 'have a play' with it.  Mostly using PrestaShop atm which is fairly easy to hack around with but it is also a bit limited. Free though ;)

Leona

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #5 on: April 06, 2012, 11:13:39 AM »
I would go with woo commerce, you only need one extension to be able to get into the closed support forum and chances are you will buy one. A lot of people are moving to woo comerce and extra plugin development is moving very quickly (new ones appearing every couple of weeks in code canyon and on the woo site directly).

Out of the box it isn't perfect a couple of niggles regarding  display To me the category display is not ideal,
1. 'arrange by' drop downs are at the bottom when they should be above the products,

2. if you have sub categories they are all set to be inline with the products so if you have say 3 subcategories and are displaying 16 products per page you will have one line at the top with 3 subcategories and a product then a line at the bottom with just 3 categories.

3. You have to implement a paging plugin to display paging on categories pages

4. They are not naturally aligned for all select option buttons to be inline so depending on the length of titles your page can look messy

5. the shortcode doesn't allow for pagination so you are set to the number of products you can display through a category shortcode on a page.

Product display

The shortcode for multiple products isn't working for me and it naturally aligns them on a seperate line for each product so not good for trying to add a selection to a post or page.

Checkout/conversion

User can guest checkout or create an account, you can create a wordpress user then link them to their order based on the information submitted but personally I would prefer it to create an account for the user automatically and send them the details when they order like shopp does.


Shipping options
Limited by themselves but the table rate plugin offers a great solution allowing you to create different rules for different product groups, although it is time consuming to set up it can allow you to be very specific and offer a lot of different options and priorities rules, a fabulous solution for a very complex problem.


However, with these negatives in mind, this system is still hands down the best eCommerce system I have worked with so far even though it is still in its infancy with the arrange of plugins growing every week it just keeps getting better (although it will cost you in extras plugins range from $12 to $50/75)

The problem I have found with Magento is although out of the box it is a good system, extras are expensive and it is very cumbersome to manipulate and get my teeth into. I decided to drop it entirely when I heard eBay bought it as if they run this project like their other businesses then I see trouble and much frustration for programmers ahead.

There is a new multiple product import plugin for woocommerce and some bulk management plugins as well so you may want to look into this before adding manually as they may save you a lot of time.

Hope this helps




I, Brian

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #6 on: April 17, 2012, 02:44:59 PM »
IBrian- what is it about it that is so difficult to work with? We're considering moving towards using it more.  A lot of the complaints I have seen are from people not used to working in a more object orientated way and with MVC in particular.  These are big plusses for me, so I am trying to figure out what the hurdles might be.

I think the entire business premise for Magento appears to be to make the software as user unfriendly as possible, so that the company behind it can sell support.

There is nothing user friendly in the system - everything from the wrong checkboxes checked to slow product upload, no import/export with images, "foreign keys" in the database to make copying dbs a little more difficult, and an upgrade process that requires pages of command line prompts to do safely. A template system that is counter intuitive, a user interface that has no normal short cuts. User friendliness is simply not built into this.

It is so far removed from my normal Wordpress/vbulletin usability experience it is unbelievable.

I would jump to Woos commerce in an instant, if it wasn;t for the fact that:

a) I'd have to redo hundreds of products manually
b) Wordpress is so much a hacking target

Rooftop

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #7 on: April 18, 2012, 08:39:50 AM »
Thanks for updating that. Interesting.
I'll take another look at woocommerce. Last time though it was ridiculously over simplistic and not much use for us.  Not many good options now are there?

hungrygoose

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #8 on: April 18, 2012, 09:19:05 AM »
I used to like Magento when it was the only real option compared to Zen and OS-commerce. Most of the good plugins were cheap and I love being able to google almost any issue and find an answer.  I started realising though that I was googling how to solve problems that shouldn't exist, eg exporting a datafeed, or changing the admin username causing me to get locked out.  And why on earth doesn't Magento have a grid of subcategories on a main category as standard or at least an easy way to do it!??

I like http://www.opencart.com/ at the moment but haven't used it in a production sense yet (my eliquid site was burned by BMR..) the back end is nice and simple and imports seem quick. 

B - I'm confused as to why you cannot export all the info from Magento, is it because a lot of products have options??

Leona

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #9 on: April 18, 2012, 02:35:04 PM »
Agree on the wordpress hacking target and you still have the upgrade issues etc, there may be a magento to woo commerce plugin now, check the (woo extensions and code canyon for extensions). Also big shops with thousands of products are probably not a good idea on wordpress. As for features, plugins are coming out thick and fast now (my wishlist keeps growing lol) so feature sets are building quickly but of course that is extra expense to consider.

I, Brian

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #10 on: April 18, 2012, 09:23:32 PM »
Agree on the wordpress hacking target and you still have the upgrade issues etc, there may be a magento to woo commerce plugin now, check the (woo extensions and code canyon for extensions). Also big shops with thousands of products are probably not a good idea on wordpress. As for features, plugins are coming out thick and fast now (my wishlist keeps growing lol) so feature sets are building quickly but of course that is extra expense to consider.

Hm, looks interesting:
http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com/shopping-cart-migration-options/4916-magento-to-woocommerce-migration


NoBeard

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #11 on: April 19, 2012, 09:11:12 AM »
I used cart2cart to migrate from CubeCart to PrestaShop and it worked really well. Some product descriptions had html in them which didn't transfer across properly but that only caused a few product pages to display incorrectly and was easy to fix! If Magento has lots of extra options/attributes that Woo Commerce doesn't then I'm not sure weather that extra data would just get lost in the ether?

I, Brian

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #12 on: April 19, 2012, 01:50:23 PM »
Emailed a development company for a quote for upgrading Magento from 1.5 to 1.6, after reading some help articles on their site.

Their reply?

Quote
The process will take 5 working days and we will charge $1000 for upgrade this is discount rate we are offering this week  normally our charges are $80 per hour. And the work is of 20 Hours. We can start immediately. Please do let us know your decision ASAP.

5 days? 20 hours?

Feck this, I hate Magento again.

Original development company I was getting work done with has gone silent.

Does not like relying on third parties for key work, especially when they prove unreliable.

Going to install Woos commerce and see how that looks.

Rooftop

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #13 on: April 20, 2012, 09:50:53 AM »
bloody hell, 20 hours for a point upgrade?  If they are getting takers at that rate maybe we will switch to Magento and just offer a flying support service.

Rumbas

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Re: Magento vs Woocommerce
« Reply #14 on: April 20, 2012, 10:44:18 AM »
>we will switch to Magento and just offer a flying support service.

We are building a huge shop for a client and for 20 hours you get sh##. It's complex system, but pretty cool :)