Redstage Magento Blog

My last post covered the benefits of Magento, so I figured it would only be fair to discuss the other side of the coin.

What are the limitations of Magento?

You didn’t think you were going to get all of this awesome functionality and endless extensibility without a few catches did you?

1) Speed

We’re just going to tackle the big one right off the bat.  Yeah, Magento is slow, really slow.  I’m sure that’s what you’ve heard anyway.  The truth is, that it’s only really slow in the wrong hands.  Let’s start from the beginning.

Magento was designed to be the most extenisble system ever made.  And the original developers definitely made it happen.  To accomplish this, the system had to be architected by isolating each feature so that changing (extending) that feature wouldn’t affect the rest of the system.  The result is a whooole lot of files.  Magento is reading hundreds if not thousands of different files in hundreds of folders for every single visitor that’s on your site.

So with Magento’s biggest strength, it also inherited its biggest weakness.  I’m pretty sure that if Magento hadn’t gotten so popular so rapidly with tens of thousands of feature requests piling up on their site, then they would’ve gotten around to this speed problem.

What is one to do?  Based on our extensive experience on the subject, there’s actually a lot you can do.  First and foremost, GET A GOOD HOST.  And by good, I also mean that specializing in Magento.  If you throw just default magento onto a Godaddy dedicated server, it’s going to be very slow.  We’ve worked with at least a dozen different hosts, and have had our biggest success with a company called MageMojo — top notch hardware, Magento knowledge, and service.

Next you’re going to want to check out 101 Ways to Speed up your Magento.  It’s a very comprehensive guide.

The hosting is probably 80% of the problem, then the tweaks in the guide should make up the other 20%.  If you have a custom theme, and you’re site’s still really slow after both of those suggestions have been explored, then your problem most likely lies in one of two areas: 1. Your Extensions or 2. A custom Query.

Often times an extension developer will release something that works on a demo store, but is crippling when throwing traffic at it or a DB or more than 10 products.  A great example is a shop by brand extension that we once used that queried every single brand to see if it had products in it just to build a dropdown menu of the active brands.  It added a full second or more to the site’s load time.  That’s one of the reasons that we built our own Shop by Brand Extension.

Similarly, a query written by your site’s development team, may be seemlingly innocent, but under load it kills you.  Usually it’s a very small, simple query that ends up being repeated hundreds of times to build a menu or find bestsellers.

2) Documentation

Well, there really is none.  The code isn’t really documented at all, and the manual that Magento has for sale isn’t really that useful.  To be honest, most open source platforms have been very poorly documented, but Magento hasn’t really even given it a shot.

For administration of your magento site, you’re best bet is to get your staff some Magento training, whether by webinar or 1 on 1.  The system has its fair share of quirks and unique terminology that take getting used to.  On the development front, it’s incredibly important to use a firm or developer that has extensive Magento experience.  More on that in #4.

3) Upgrades

Again, one of the main benefits of Magento, regular updates, is also a bit of a curse.  Magento’s never really had a good upgrade path, meaning a documented and well thought out process to go from one version to another.  And it doesn’t seem like that’s ever going to be a priority.  The result is that, when upgrading, things tend to break.  Most of the time it’s because a site wasn’t developed using Magento best practices.  But often it’s actually because Magento changed the name of something that was even being properly extended.  I remember one upgrade that Magento removed like 18 DB tables and added 30 new ones.  That was annoying…

There’s no real great way to overcome this limitation other than just ensuring that your site is always properly extended and properly developed with Magento best practices. That’s definitely a great start and will avoid most of your problems.  Anytime you upgrade, though, do it on a separate development environment with some Magento experts on hand.  There’s a great chance that something will break and need to be patched up before you can go live with the new version.

4) Complexity of theming and development, Cost of development

Developing a Magento takes about 5 times as long as your old OSCommerce, Zen Cart, CRE Loaded, or similar.  The theming system is, well, tedious.  However, the extra time put in in the beginning is well worth it.  Since Magento is a modern system built to modern standards, you won’t end up with the crazy hack job that you used to get customizing an older shopping cart.  This means that the total cost of the site over time will actually be much cheaper.

About 30% of our projects that come into our office are recoveries from other developers or other firms that have screwed it up.  About 70% of the sites that we have touched, that weren’t built by us, were not built with Magento best practices.  Although, to be fair, that’s usually why the end up in our lap in the first place.

5) Search

The out of the box search is, well, awful.  It’s pretty much as basic as it gets, and is totally useless in this age of e-commerce.  It does have some built in tweaks that you can play with, but still, useless.  You do have some options though.  Firstly, there’s Better Store Search, a well established Magento Extension that’s pretty popular.  Then there’s Blast Search Lucene, which upgrades your search to use the Lucene library.  If you want to get really fancy and compete with the big boys, you’ll need a Semantic Search like Celebros for Magento.  (Shameless plug: Redstage is the first certified solutions provider of Celebros for Magento).

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I think that about covers it.  Hopefully I haven’t scared you all off!

In my opinion, Magento’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses.  Magento is really one of the most powerful and extensible e-commerce platforms that I’ve ever worked with.  It’s important, though, to at least know what you’re getting yourself into.

Related articles

• Benefits of Magento (redstage.com)

What are the benefits of Magento over other shopping cart solutions?

Magento has pretty much taken over the ecommerce technology space, and we get that question more than any other.  So for everyone that stumbles on this article in your search for your ecommerce technology, I hope this provides a little help on your journey.

Is this real insight? Or just more marketing babble?  Well, Redstage been in the ecommerce business for 7 years now, and we’ve worked on over 150 Magento sites over the past 3 years.  So this list is a personal account of our experiences.  Let’s start with the feature set…

#1) Out-of-the-box Features

Of all the e-commerce systems that I’ve worked with, Magento really has the most impressive set of features right out of the box.  I was actually planning on spending a few paragraphs discussing them, but I ended up stumbling on Magento’s new features page: http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/features.  It’s a pretty comprehensive listing, so go check it out before moving on to #2.

#2) Open Source

OK this is an obvious one, but I felt like I couldn’t write a benefits list without including it.  The platform is not only free to download but you are free to build upon it for your specific business needs.

#3) Extensions

Magento Extensions and the Extension Community have really set the platform apart from the rest of the pack.  One of the main goals of the Magento core development team was to create the most extensible ecommerce system on the planet.  And they succeeded, in a big way.

It’s a little bit of a blessing and a curse, actually.  Because developing a Magento site is actually much harder than other platforms before it.  To properly develop any custom functionality for Magento, you must basically create an extension so you’re not touching any of Magento’s core.  It’s a whole lot more complicated than just creating a custom hack.  But with that extra initial investment, comes HUGE savings in the long run.

Back in the OSCommerce, Zen Cart, and CRE Loaded days, an ecommerce site was a big hack job of custom code and “addons” that were basically just instructions for additional hacks.  The more complex your site got, the more of a hack job it would become.  Random errors and stability problems were a frequent result.  Many times, complex additions would mean a full redevelopment of the whole site.

Magento, on the other hand, is properly architected to be able to extend its functionality in an elegant and stable way.  And it’s really a huge advantage for your business.  For instance, I wonder how much it cost Amazon to develop their Frequently Bought Together or Who Viewed This Also Viewed up-selling interfaces?  Well, with Magento, you can have either one of those for about 50 bucks as extensions, and about 3 minutes of installation.  Shameless plug… you can actually pick up both of those extensions at our extension store: http://store.redstage.com.

Also, I think it’s safe to say that Magento now has the largest and fastest growing community of developers of any ecommerce system.  Thanks to the community, Magento’s feature set is growing at the speed of light.  Perfect example: When Google +1 came out, I think it was less than 24 hours before a Magento extension came out to place +1 buttons on all of your product pages.

#4) Admin Interface

Magento really has the best admin interface of any that we’ve ever seen in an open source system that came before it.  It’s more of what you would expect from a hosted SaaS platform.  Hosted solutions aren’t usually appropriate for anything other than very small business, though, since they are almost impossible to customize to your needs.  So with Magento, you get the benefit of a much more customer friendly interface but the power of having your own flexible solution.

When I first started working with the platform, I was especially surprised by how complete the order and customer management sections were.  The promotions manager is also very cool, but I guess that’s more of a core feature than just the interface.  Oh, and category management is also great too.

#5) Regular Updates

For the incredible burst in popularity that Magento’s received over the past 3 years, I have to applaud the company for keeping up as well as they have.  I’m sure that they’ve gotten 10’s of thousands of bug reports and feature requests in that time.  With Magento, you can confidently expect a new release,  packed with bug fixes and probably a few new features, every few months.

Alright, I think that about sums it up.  I’m also putting together an article on the limitations of Magento, that I’ll link to as soon as its complete.

Related articles

• Limitations of Magento (redstage.com)

Take a look at these design showcases.  Awesome magento designers out there.  Know any that aren’t listed here?  Leave a comment below!

Magentique.com

http://magentique.com/

ArsMagentoGallery.com

http://www.arsmagentogallery.com/

MagentoMix.com

http://magentomix.com/category/stores/

ShowMagento.com
http://www.showmagento.com/showcase

Magento Showcase Website

http://themes.magentocommerce.ca/

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You might think it's a bit preemptive to start planning for the Holidays now, but it's almost too late already.  Think about it this way: if you want to make a bunch of changes to your e-commerce website such as an upgrade, a new design, or any new features you need a significant amount of time to get it done.  You'll need to define the project, gather proposals from various service providers, go through contract negotiation, and then have the work completed.  A fully custom design, implementation and customization can take a couple months, so don't delay any further and start thinking about the holiday season and how you're going to prepare for it. 

Also you need to plan out your MARKETING! The last thing that you want to do is stay up all night on November, 23 trying to write email copy and change your AdWords ads to holiday specific text.  Start planning now, and you'll definitely have a more profitable season with much less stress. 

So that's the overview about why, but let's go over the direction as well as the specific things you can do to make your holiday season more successful.  We'll go over checklists, specific ideas and tactics to make your store ready for the 2010 holidays.

Design Changes
You might want to change some of the main site graphics to seasonal, relevant images.  If you have pictures of people within the design, make sure they're wearing coats, and you can throw some snowflakes in the header to make it feel like winter.

Sales
Of course you're going to have a holiday sale.  But which works better, 10% off your order over $X or Free Shipping?  Start testing now! Something as simple as the wording of a deal can effect your conversion rate drastically.

Gift Wrapping
You can offer gift wrapping as an upsell during checkout.  If you're going to offer this option though, it's important to plan ahead and get this process worked out within your current procedures.

Delivery Schedules / Deadlines
You can create a sense of urgency if you put the proper messaging on your site.  For instance, "Order before December 20th for Guaranteed Arrival before Christmas!" This short message, repeated throughout the website, could be the push that someone needs to get through the checkout.

Updated Returns Policy
When it comes to gifts, one of the main concerns that people have when buying online is possibly having to return the item.  They might be afraid that the clothing won't fit properly or the item will arrive defective.  Make sure that your return policy is easy to find and easy to understand.

Add Video to Product Descriptions
One of the main reasons that customers abandon product pages is because they didn't get a good enough "look" at the product.  If you have a short video of someone reviewing the item or simply demonstrating it, it builds confidence with the potential customer and differentiates you from your competitors.  Anything that you can do that will get someone to push "Add To Cart" is crucial.

Beef Up Customer Support
Make sure that you have enough staff to take calls, answer questions, and train them to sell!  You should have multiple ways for visitors to contact you online via toll-free number, email, chat, twitter or even fax.  It can't hurt to have the pathways to contact you because if someone wants to call you, they are very close to purchasing.  On the other hand, you also want to have support for current/past customers because that is what sparks people to talk about their experiences.  Think about how Zappos.com because so popular from having incredible customer service.

New Banner Ads
If you advertise with Banner Ads, you should start brainstorming some new designs.  Also start thinking of new places to advertise, and new media buying strategies that can drive tons of traffic to your site. 

New Adwords  (PPC) Keywords / Ads
Don't wait until the last minute to add new keywords into your campaigns that are seasonally specific.  Also, try testing out new Ad Copy that has holiday style to it. Add in a coupon code, mention a shipping deadline or another offer. 

Gift Categories / Gift Guide
Organized your items into gift categories by person or price (Great Gifts for Mom, Dad, etc…). If you give visitors useful search options and filters, it lets them find what they want faster; speed is key during the holidays.

Affiliate Relations
If you have an affiliate program, get them excited about promoting your products.  Show them landing pages, new items and sales that they can promote before they start.  This allows super-affiliates to get banners made, plan media buys, start new PPC campaigns and test them out before it's too late. 

New Products
Do some research and figure out what types of products in your industry are going to be the popular items of the season.  If you're going to stock these items, remember there's significant work to do each time (ordering inventory, storage, photos, description, etc…).  So start the research soon so you're prepared to launch them in the Fall.

Shipping Deals
Shipping is the #1 type of sale that you can offer your visitors.  Having free shipping makes the ordering process seem more realistic and it makes the price seem more feasible (since there's no addition involved).  Another great tactic is to have Free Shipping on orders above $X.  You'll get a higher average order and happier clients.

Social Media
Start building your following now! Starting a Social Media campaign in November would be a waste of time; however if you have 5000 followers (on twitter for instance) by then you can turn it into a traffic generator, a communication/ support platform and more.  Also remember, 200 happy, engaged followers is much better than 10,000 random people. Get your following organically and you'll be much better off.

Cart Abandonment Recapture
You can automate the recapturing of an abandoned cart by sending an email to the user with the previous cart contents. 

Gift Receipts & Gift Messages
Have checkout options to add a note or gift receipt to the order.  This way, there's proof of purchase but the price isn't in the box.  It works especially well when offering gifts that are sent directly to the recipient.

Backup Server / Increased Bandwidth
If you're doing media buys and adding a huge budget to your AdWords account you might want to upgrade your web server to make sure that your site doesn't go down during periods of high traffic.

These are just a few of the things you can do to prepare your site for the holidays and increase your conversion rate. If you want a full report with over 50 site optimizations that you can use any time, holidays or not, opt in below and we'll send it right over!

Send me the sales optimization eBook!

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We often get asked why we use a retainer based payment system for our Magento Support services.  First off, let me catch you up on what I mean by “Retainer Based Support”.  Our Magento support service works similarly to the way an attorney retainer works.  Basically, if you need ongoing assistance with your Magento site, the retainer is a pre-payment for a number of hours.  These hours can be applied to many different tasks.  Here’s some of the things we’ve done for retainer clients in the past:

• Magento Upgrades
• Plugin installation & Configuration
• Bug fixes
• Template / Theme Tweaks
• Custom features or custom plugins and
• Switching web hosts

We don’t limit the number of issues or fixes you can submit, it’s all based on how long it takes to fix everything.

Luckily, we’re (really) good at this.

If you ever paid for a legal retainer, it’s almost exactly the same. The lawyer will deduct the hourly fee from the pre-payment whenever you need them to look over a contract or advise in any legal situation.  Redstage Magento support works the same way.  If you need help with any aspect of your Magento store, you log a ticket and we get to work.

Ok, so back to the point.  Why a retainer based system?

Deducting hourly from a retainer allows us to provide the highest level of service to our support customers.  First, the retainer doesn’t expire.  You can use 2 hours one month, take one off with no issues or tickets, and then use 5 hours the next month.  It let’s us provide a level of safety and security to the a Magento user because we’re there when you need us, just by logging a ticket.  You can have 100 issues, and it doesn’t matter since it’s all based on the time it takes to complete the tasks.  If it’s easy for us, it’s cheap for you.

We time the retainer work to the second, so the client gets the most for their money.

I apologize if I sound sales-y, but as a marketer, Magento support is a fun sale… Magento users come to us all the time after having bad experiences with developers who weren’t ready for the complexity of the Magento platform and we need to step in and help out.  It took us a couple years to become Magento masters but we’re one of the best around, so it’s fun to talk about.  Our development team likes working with Magento!  If you’ve ever searched around on twitter for Magento, the average developer is frustrated but we’ve gotten over the learning curve and know the system inside and out.

Don’t just take my word for it; we have clients who tell us things like this:

“”THANK YOU!!! We all finally feel confident that we have found the right partner for our new business.“

-Sharon, Founder, Charleston Naturally

That gives us a warm fuzzy feeling… and it proves that the retainer system works!

Now, I have to ask… If you need anything Magento related, call 1-888-335-2747 and we’ll set you up w/ a retainer, or a full project if you’re just starting out (full design & development).

I hope you understand a bit more about what we’re all about and if you have any questions, leave a comment below!

Thanks!

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