The Core
Why We Are Here => Web Development => Topic started by: I, Brian on April 04, 2012, 10:48:41 PM
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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. :)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ;)
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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
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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
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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?
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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??
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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.
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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
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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?
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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?
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.
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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.
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>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 :)
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Just installed Woocommerce and went to download an imported from Magento. Only to find Woothemes hacked:
http://demo.woothemes.com/dos/
Still, Magento is too much of a loose canon for a sinle user like myself, especially as whenever I ask third-party developers for help they prove either unreliable or simply take the p##s.
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Just had an email that product importer deluxe for woo commerce should be rolling out support for attributes tomorrow, also have to say woo commerce have been absolutely brill on the customer service side.
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Had a bit of a look at woo commerce doesn't seem a serious contender at all for us.
The only serious alternative we now have to magento is Drupal commerce. Looks like it could be a contender for us, but haven't got far enough down that path to say much more than that yet.
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Just had an email that product importer deluxe for woo commerce should be rolling out support for attributes tomorrow, also have to say woo commerce have been absolutely brill on the customer service side.
Is that for moving from Magento?
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I had a magento site and we were having such performance and usability issues that we switched to Big Commerce. It is about $40 a month, but includes hosting. It has a nice feature set and it pretty easy to use.
Not as configurable as magento, but 100x easier / quicker / stable / etc. At least in our use.
If you have a dedicated server for it and know what you are doing magento is great. For anyone who doesn't I would stay away from it.
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Am currently migrating from Magento to Woocommerce.
I'm sick of having to rely on unreliable developers to do what should be the simplest things in Magento. In Wordpress I should be able to make most any changes I need as Wordpress actually cares about being relatively user-friendly. :)
Magento is a big pile of wank IMO, and that the only reason developers recommend it is that they need to be hired to operate it!
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Is it a large store brian?
I can't help thinking it will be fine for a focused store selling a small set of simple items but anything larger or more complex won't cut it (but then product combinations are a PITA anyway)
Be interesting to hear how it goes.
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We just did integration to an important Danish payment processor and the whole experience with Woocommerce and Wishlist Membership software was really good. WooCommerce is actually pretty cool for a small store and day-to-day operations are a breeze.
Thumbs up for Woocommerce for smaller stores.
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Is it a large store brian?
I can't help thinking it will be fine for a focused store selling a small set of simple items but anything larger or more complex won't cut it (but then product combinations are a PITA anyway)
Be interesting to hear how it goes.
It's only got a few hundred products - my previous impression was that Magento was an industry standard, much improved over osCommerce, and the one to use for the long term - so that's why I set up with Magento in the first place. Figured pain now, to save on the pain of a big switchover later on.
However, Magento is a bad joke, that is only useful IMO if you're milking clients for development support. It doesn't appear to do anything special. I thought osCommerce was user-unfriendly but Magento takes it to new extremes.
Am finding Woocommerce to be a far better experience - it's been developed with all the core features of Magento I needed, but is far far easier and simpler to use. Any shortfalls in the Woocommerce software itself seems easily covered by the plugins.
As I have at least one WP site running fine with tens of thousands of posts, I can't see any longterm problems with Woocommerce, so long as the security element is covered.
Time and money wasted with Magento, but the Woocommerce set up seems to be going fine.
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That's a nice size store to set-up and manage :)
I agree with what you say. Magento is so over complicated but for most they think it's the route to go down because of all the developers shouting about it, saying they need a jet plane to go to the shops in.
But then it's not a bad business model to have. It's lucky we're in the know :)
Open cart is my normal choice of weapon now, but I might have to find the time to play with woocommerce now, cheers Brian :p
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To be fair, most of those products are just variations of the same thing. Magento forces you to create a new product for every variation you have. So if you have a shirt that comes in three sizes, you need to create 4 different products - 1 for each size, and then 1 to group them together. A shirt with 3 sizes and 3 colours means you need to create 7 products.
The suggestion with Woocommerce is that you can do away with all this using the "variable products" option - create the product, and then on a single page list the variable attributes and corresponding stock levels. That would be so much more intuitive and easy to use, and make more sense. Will see later if that's the case once I've finished editing my imported list.
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Well, I'm all set up with Woocommerce now, and everything is running fine as I need it.
There are still a few niggles with Woocommerce - it doesn't feel like a mature platform yet, more an advanced beta. The main flaw is the stock management process, specifically dealing with "cost", which is still not built into Woocommerce by default. However, it's easy to create a custom field in the WP-admin section to apply to all products and enter the value there.
The downside with that method is that I have to set up all products as "grouped" (the equivalent of Magento "configurable") - when Woocommerce provides an extremely simple "variable" option where you simply add product variations by SKU, attribute, and stock level to an existing product - how Magento should have done it - but you can't apply different "cost" levels here.
There are also a few issues with "hidden" products still being displayed in templates or used in the Google feed.
However, these are issues I figure will be resolved as it grows.
Also, because it's Wordpress, it's damn easy to tweak most everything, and when I have had to post in their support forum, answers have come relatively quickly (as opposed to the Magento forums where no one really seems to know how to do anything).
Hopefully Woocommerce will mature into a more comprehensive platform on issues such as cost, but the variety of extensions take up much of the slack of additional functionality.
Another pointer is that it would be quite easy to set up multiple shops with different products for keyword URLs using Woocommerce, or else clones just using the export/import feature.
Frankly, I would have paid real money for Woocommerce, and at present, cannot think of a single reason for using Magento unless you want to employ a team of developers to do all the work for you. Magento may be "free" but I've already wasted a lot of time and money trying to work with it, and "open source" just makes it feel like OSCommerce - all the complications (ie, templates) but with even less usability for the store admin.
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Thanks for the update, I have just built my second shop on woocommerce now and I have to say the set up has been sweet, lovely and easy unlike other platforms where I have spent at least a month under the hood tinkering. A lot of cheaper plugins are coming out now on code canyon and there are a few helpful free plugins too. Developers are quickly adapting plugins to move to woo and the spread of people now developing on it is swift. I have also had a fast and helpful response on the members forum as well when posting for support issues, but thankfully I have not had to test this much.
I also bought a plugin that was incompatible with a particular merchant for UK sales, it was about a week before I went onto integration after scratching my head and doing some investigation I realised my blunder and emailed them. They were brill and just refunded straight away and were very pleasant about it, which again made me happy in my decision to switch.
Whatever 'off the shelf' cart we build on will never be perfect because every trader has their own individual needs but I am finding it very easy to most of my needs and love that I can integrate other non related plugins into my shop system which is why I chose to move to a wordpress ecommerce system originally back when I originally set up on shopp.
It would be interesting to know at what point it starts falling apart though, the shops I have built on it only have a reasonably small range so I have not tested the limitations yet.
So I am still championing them, updates are coming thick and fast which of course has its disadvantages if you need to heavy tweaks to the code, but the advantage is it is improving all the time.
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I know this is an old one but just want to drag it back up as I know many of you moved. I haven't really tested the fall down point of woo yet and am curious as to how far you can push it, is anyone running it with a large number of products/high volume traffic yet? Have any of you managed to bring it to it's knees?
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Not busy enough with traffic enough for that.
However, plenty of experience with Wordpress on busy sites before and never had a problem, so long as it was hosted on my own server. My shop is.
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I just did an audit for a client with a rather large Magento shop and they had 1,2 mio pages indexed. Way way more than the # of products and categories. IMO one the biggest issues for Magento is dupe content issues as you can call a product from a wide range of url's.
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You get it with all carts TBH
With the sort feature, no. product per pages, tags etc it's a minefield.
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If that's the case shouldn't a module for creating a proper robots.txt for each specific cart platform be all the rage?
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I use the plugin redirection to try and control dupe content on wordpress (not that I have done it on all mainly client sites). It is also good for creating pretty urls for QR Codes, redirecting old products to similar live products etc ie with one client we bought a relevant domain just for their mailshots to redirect and track clicks with a small, relevant and pretty url.
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Hi, I am new to ecommerce and I've been hearing of the woes of working with Magento and the praises of Woocommerce. I am more tending to Woocommerce to start my first online store. My concern though is if Woocommerce is scalable enough to handle my store's growth when it moves beyond 2000 products and/sku's, say 30,000 - as I intend on growing my store(s) as the primary business model (and not just as a supplement to a main brick n mortar version store). I am also considering the possibility of Prestashop, but due to the ease of use and stability of the Wordpress platform... my tendency is Woocommerce in this planning phase... any advice?
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If you know your way round Wordpress then it's a brilliant system to get yourself up and running.
It's simple and there are lots of plugins to get the functionality you want (mostly paid tho), plus if you want to you can push it even further if you need too with a bit of coding knowledge.
Another system worthwhile looking at if you new to it all is Shopify.
Out of all the ecommmerce systems I've looked at, this system removes all the confusing and distracting extras and purely focuses on getting the site up and running.
Lots of businesses have started with shopfiy to tests the waters then changed systems once they can see potential in the business.
By this time, you should have money to invest to get help in building the site to your personal requirements.
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I am in the middle of setting up a store in Shopify. Overall it is pretty decent but it always seems like there is something I want to do that it can't. Or maybe it can but a dolt like me without much in the way of programming experience can't get it to do it. There are tons of themes and plugins for it though.
The whole system is a bit buggy but nothing that is a deal killer. I was looking at WooCommerce and SquareSpace and ended up going with Shopify.
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Yea, with shopfiy i kept feeling something was missing. I wanted to push it further and further, but that's just me in the never ending tweaking cycle.
But that's not what shopify is about. In some ways it's a blessing.
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Thanks for the response... but I really still would like to know if woocoommerce can handle product catalogs that are over 2000 products... is there anybody out there with the experience with this "newcomer" that can offer some insight?
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You might find this interesting:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/64592/woocommerce-store-with-30-000-products
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Thanks for the response... but I really still would like to know if woocoommerce can handle product catalogs that are over 2000 products... is there anybody out there with the experience with this "newcomer" that can offer some insight?
My biggest Wordpress site - non-Woocommerce - has nearly 20k posts and no problems, so I would be surprised if Woocommerce had problems handling tens of thousands of products.
Magento is a complete joke and nothing more than OSCommerce rebranded and done worse.
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Some e-Commerce experts claim that WooCommerce is one of the most fast growing platform. Comparing with Magento it is considerably easier in administration. I agree with guys that a lot of store owners move from Magento to WooCommerce.
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I don't really like either, but I do find it an odd comparison. To me they are serving different markets. I can't think of many stores when I would be tossing up between those two choices.
What Magento have done really well though is to persuade store owners that they are the right choice. I had another this week: We proposed a solution using the right platform for their particular requirements. What they wanted would have been a nightmare with Magento. Response from the client:
"We love what you have proposed and we we really get what you are about and want to work with you. However we have decided that we are going to use Magento. Would you consider becoming Magento partners?"
No I bloody won't. To do what they need in magento is going to triple their cost and they know it. Yet someone told them it is what they should be using and so that is what they will be using.
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>someone told them it is what they should be using
Probably their mate down the pub whos dabbled in dreamweaver
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Lol yes the great debates, I have had many where people have never worked with the alternative or even Magento for that matter who have battled for Magento with complete and utter confidence that this is the only platform to work with. I have been batting woocommerce since before it's release back in beta development with the Jigoshop team. It has grown rapidly and has gained traction, which has been fantastic. However, unfortunately the woo team have made some key decisions this year which I believe will significantly affect the platforms future unless they retract and develop a different model. If they don't, I see interest waning and the commercial viability being less enticing to push further major development. The market is now ripe for another solution to come up from the back runners, Jigoshop if played right could be back in with a chance of taking the lead or we may see a brand new solution sprout through. It is a shame, I do hope they manage to continue and that I am wrong, I will still run with them for now but expect I will be changing platforms in a couple of years time. However it certainly won't be to Magento.
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I've said it before : Drupal commerce is very good.
As a e-commerce platform it is up there and you don't need to worry about the Drupal side of things. However, if you want to get your hands dirty then the fact that it is entity aware makes for some incredible opportunities. I'm pitching an idea at the moment for a blended community + store that I just don't see as being feasible on any other platform. Still simple out of the box: Use kickstart and you can be running in a couple of hours.
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Drupal scares me, not sure why but it does.
Maybe I should over come my fear and use it on my next project....
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Drupal IS scary! Learning curve on it is horrible. Damn powerful though.
Drupal commerce kickstart though is a product built with Drupal. If you don't want to learn any Drupal you don't need to. I think that the structure of it is genius. Where are Magento just piles on every feature, hacking and sticking on everything that is asked for, Drupal commerce has very few features: but those that it does have can be used in powerful ways.
For instance there is a "rules" system that replaces pretty much every discounting, shipping, points, rewards module and a stack of other stuff. Likewise concepts like entities replace all the mess of features and media and spec and structure it in a way that actually makes sense. Simple, powerful and flexible systems.
Drupal's big weakness (IMHO) is in deployment. If you use modern deployment methods like GIT or even SVN it is a raging pain in the c##k. The data structure merges content with structure too much and makes a mess of version control. I have nearly killed people because of it. That said, magento and wordpress both do that too (and it looks like this is well addressed in drupal 8). If you hack live then this ins't an issue anyway.
If you are going to take a look don't get confused by the terminology: Drupal Commerce is the lego set to build custom e-commerce sites using drupal. Drupal Commerce kickstart is the prebuilt off the shelf version made with that lego.