Magento Review

While Magento is far from being the easiest to use eCommerce solution on the market, it’s definitely worth learning how to use it if you’re a serious business owner. Magento is a serious tool for serious businesses or people with loads of technical skills when it comes to coding websites. However, if you know how to use this platform or feel confident that you have the necessary skills to get around with it, you’ll be rewarded with a ton of great features. Magento is one of the most flexible and customizable eCommerce platforms on the market. You’ll be able to create just about any type of online store and make it look and function the way you’ve always wanted your online store to work. Overall, Magento is a powerful, robust, and highly customizable platform, but you’ll need great technical skills in order to be able to use it.

Ease of Use

If ease of use is important to you, you’ll want to avoid using Magento. This platform was created for website developers who know how to code and for large businesses that have teams helping them build their online presence. Magento is not an easy to use website builder and everything about it requires coding knowledge. You’ll have a long road ahead of you if you choose to use Magento and you’ve never built a website before. In most cases, it can end up taking weeks to build your online store using Magento and once it’s up and running, you’ll still need to perform a lot of regular maintenance, which will prove to be much more complex than with other platforms. Overall, only choose Magento if you know what you’re doing.

Functionality

If you have the proper skills to run Magento or if you’re willing to put in the effort to learn all about it, you’ll be gifted with a ton of functionalities. Magento was built for developers and large enterprises that need loads of customizable aspects. Once you figure out how to use this eCommerce solution, you’ll be able to fully customize your online store to look, feel and function the way you’ve always wanted. There are plenty of customizable features and functions, making it the ideal eCommerce platform of choice for any serious business owner. Although you’ll need a ton of technical skills to get around on this platform, it can definitely be very rewarding once you figure it out.

Being able to use various integrations is a wonderful way to make your site much more functional. Fortunately, Magento is an open-source platform, which means developers worldwide work hard to bring you all sorts of cool and useful plugins. The Magento Marketplace is packed with thousands of apps and plugins, making it one of the largest eCommerce platform marketplaces online. You will literally be able to find all sorts of excellent integrations including automatic tax calculators, custom search functions, email marketing tools and so much more. Best of all, many of the plugins at Magento are free to use, which allows you to find tons of great tools for free. However, be sure to look into the pricing before using a plugin because some integrations can be incredibly expensive. Overall, Magento is a powerful tool with a massive database of plugin integrations.

Being able to explore a large variety of themes when using an eCommerce platform is incredibly important. You’ll want to be able to quickly set up the main skeleton of your website from the get-go and a theme makes it possible. However, many eCommerce solutions only offer a few basic themes, leaving you with tons of customizations to make on your own. Fortunately, Magento provides you with a large variety of free and paid themes so you can hit the ground running. With their massive selection of themes, you’ll really be able to find the ideal solution that fits your specific needs and business type. They have a nice selection of free themes to choose from, which is great because their paid themes tend to get a little pricey. Fortunately, buying a paid theme is a one-time purchase (not a recurring fee). Additionally, the quality of both the free and the paid themes at Magento is superb, allowing you to benefit from truly high-quality themes regardless of whether you choose to go with free or paid themes.

If you’re looking for a solid platform that delivers speed and high uptime, you’re going to enjoy using Magento. This is one of the most robust and powerful eCommerce solutions on the internet. They have a very stable platform and depending on your chosen hosting provider, you could expect 99 to 100% uptime. They perform occasional maintenance, but this shouldn’t be much of a problem and it should actually make the platform more powerful and reliable. Magento has the capability of being incredibly fast and depending on the variables that you choose including your hosting provider, you could experience one of the fastest and most reliable eCommerce solutions available online. Overall, Magento is very powerful, reliable, and fast when matched with high-performance hosting.

Uptime

The uptime of your eCommerce solution is crucial if you want a smooth operation that rarely fails. Choosing an eCommerce provider that can guarantee a high uptime rating is the best way to ensure that your platform doesn’t go down too often. Magento is built for developers and large enterprises, so they basically leave this up to you. Depending on the hosting provider chosen, your uptime will vary. This means you can spend more on a monthly basis for a better hosting company with higher uptime guarantees if you have the budget and need a platform that fails as rarely as possible. Their partnered hosting solutions are capable of guaranteeing high uptime ratings as steep as 100%. Magento Commerce itself has an uptime guarantee of 99.99% when it comes to its services and features.

Incident Frequency

We performed rigid testing in order to ensure that Magento is a stable platform. When it comes to incident frequency, they stood up to our tests. They have a very stable and robust platform that won’t let you down. One of the excellent services provided by Magento is their status page, which seems to be quite rare among eCommerce solutions these days. Their status page allows you to keep track of currently operating features and you can easily see when previous incidents occurred. We went back a few weeks and didn’t find any major issues other than scheduled maintenance. Magento is a solid eCommerce solution that truly delivers.

Speed

The speed of your platform can vary greatly when using Magento depending on the hosting of your choice. You can opt for cheaper hosting with shared servers and experience slower loading times or you can opt for faster-dedicated servers that will provide you with incredibly fast loading times. This all depends on your budget and your specific needs. Magento itself has the ability to be a really fast platform that delivers quick online stores. However, it will only be as good as the hosting servers you place it on.

Overall, the support team at Magento is far below average. You will notice much stronger customer support teams when using other similar platforms. This is mostly due to the fact that Magento is an open-source platform. However, you can find a ton of information about their platform on the internet with a quick Google search. With numerous communities on the internet discussing Magento, you shouldn’t ever have any difficulty figuring out how to use the platform. Magento offers basic email support, but the amount of help they can provide via their support channel is limited and the amount of time it takes to get a response from their email team is incredibly long - as much as 2 days in some cases. Overall, you’re best bet when using Magento is to result in online searches yourself. If you don’t enjoy having to dig for answers on your own, you probably won’t be a fan of Magento.

Support Availability

Customer support is important when running an online store. You’ll want to be able to get assistance when you need it the most no matter what time it is. Whether you’re having trouble processing a client’s payment method or even if your site crashes due to the Magento platform, having a support team backing you up at all times is crucial to have smooth operations. Magento is an open-source platform, so the support availability isn’t the best. However, they do provide decent email, which allows you to get answers to most of your inquiries. The online communities are very active, so this is one of the best ways to get information when seeking assistance.

Speed of Response

Due to the lack of support available at Magento, the speed of response isn’t the best. In fact, not too long ago, Magento didn’t even offer phone support. When contacting them by phone, you will only be able to speak to a sales team, so if you’re searching for technical support you’ll be out of luck. Email support is a little different than most eCommerce solutions. You will usually have to wait 1 to 2 days before getting an email response, which can render this support channel pointless. Fortunately, there is a very active online community in forums and with tons of review articles. You should be able to find all of the information you need simply by performing a quick Google search. Overall, the speed of response by the actual Magento support team isn’t ideal, but you shouldn’t have any issues finding the support you need online.

Friendliness & Helpfulness

Helpfulness and friendliness are crucial when talking about an eCommerce solution’s support team. The amount of assistance we received when contacting Magento wasn’t the best. We’ve seen other similar platforms offer far superior assistance on much more complex issues. Magento’s support team was able to handle very basic inquiries, but we were left on our own for complicated inquiries. Fortunately, online communities discuss every single problem imaginably. With tons of active users, it’s easy to find others who have been going through the same issues as you. Overall, if you choose Magento and need speedy response times, your best bet is to search for information online.

Email support

Email support is available at Magento when you need assistance with technical issues, but you will have to wait a pretty long amount of time in order to get a response. In most cases, you will need to wait up to 2 days before getting any type of response from their support team. In order to contact the Magento support team, you will need to fill out a support ticket via their contact page. From that moment, they will get back to you within 24 to 48 hours. However, the email support at Magento isn’t the best. They can only provide you with basic answers such as information about how to use the platform - nothing too technical such as complex issues that you may be facing. For technical assistance, you will need to search within online communities.

Magento is both a cheap and an expensive eCommerce solution. It can truly go either way depending on the hosting company that you choose, the amount of paid plugins you use, the payment processor that you go with, and much more. Additionally, you’ll need to consider whether you can build your online store yourself or if you’ll be using a website developer. If you plan on hiring someone to do the job for you, you’ll end up looking at thousands of dollars just to get the platform up and running. Maintenance fees are another price to add to the overall cost. Before choosing Magento as your eCommerce solution, you should really sit down and look at all of the variable costs according to your specific needs.

Plans Pricing

Magento is a free-to-use eCommerce platform that doesn’t cost anything to use at its core. However, there are definitely many other fees that you will need to consider. For instance, you will need to take into account the cost of hosting, purchasing a domain name, hiring a coder (if you don’t know how to use Magento), and other such fees. Overall, it’s a free tool that sounds very affordable, but it can become much more expensive than other similar platforms real quick if you don’t know how to anticipate the other costs ahead of time.

Transaction Fees

Magento does not have any type of transaction fees, so you will be able to save money on that aspect. Many other similar platforms charge a small fee for every sale you make, but this is not the case with Magento. They don’t even have pricing plans, so there are no other hidden ways of making up for the lack of transaction fees. If you’re looking for a cheap platform and you plan on selling tons of products, you’ll love Magento for this lack of transaction fees.

Other Fees

Other fees are a huge concern when using Magento. While they don’t charge any transaction fees and they don’t have any pricing plans for you to worry about, there are many other ways that you will need to spend money. First, you’ll need to purchase a domain name, then you have to pay monthly hosting fees with the hosting company of your choice. You’ll also need to consider payment processor fees, the cost of buying a premium theme, and the price of plugin integrations. Also, keep in mind that Magento is very difficult to use, so unless you have lots of coding skills (especially in PHP), you will most likely need to hire website developers, which aren’t cheap.

As an eCommerce solution geared specifically towards serious business owners, Magento is capable of helping you bring your online business to a whole new level. They make it easy for you to build an online marketplace for your products by providing you with a user-friendly dashboard and a massive amount of features so you can control your entire online store with ease.

While Magento requires more developer skills when compared to other similar platforms, it remains a simple to use eCommerce platform that just about anyone can use if they are willing to put in the effort. Once you know how to use this platform, Magento opens up a whole new world of online eCommerce solutions - you will get to experience loads of customizable options and the ability to really make your online store stand out from the crowd.

The platform was founded by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner in 2007, but the first few years were a little rocky. It took four years before any growth actually happened at Magento. In 2011, Magento was purchased by eBay/X.commerce. Today, Magento is also partnered with Adobe as they plan to expand their already highly successful cloud eCommerce solutions.

Magento sets itself apart as one of the few eCommerce platforms that specializes in robust services for large enterprises and big companies. Most eCommerce solutions only provide simple to use dashboards with basic features and limited customizable functions. Magento brings you a solid and robust platform that you can use to make very customized online stores with unique designs, functions and features.

Overall, Magento is a powerful tool with robust features. It’s free to use, but many other fees having to be calculated into the final cost such as hosting and premium themes. Since this open-source eCommerce platform is so complex, you’ll either need a ton of technical skills or you’ll need to hire a professional coder to handle the job for you. However, once your website is ready to go, you’ll really enjoy the amount of functions and features that this platform has to offer. With thousands upon thousands of apps and plugin integrations, you’ll be able to really make the most out of your online store. Magento offers basic support via email, but the online communities are where you’ll get the most help. Using this platform, you’ll be able to build powerful online stores that load fast and behave the exact way you want them to. If you’re an experienced coder or if you’re a large business looking for a powerful eCommerce solution, Magento is the way to go.