E-commerce has greatly altered the face of the business world. Nowadays, with a few clicks of a mouse or few touches in your mobile set, you could do most of your business.
While there are many big players in e-commerce or e-business, Magento has been the front runner in online business world – all due to the number of good things it offers. However, it is not devoid of disadvantages. Here below, we have compiled a list of pros and cons of choosing Magento for an e-commerce store for you to weigh them and decide whether you’d want Magneto for your e-commerce or not.
Pros
1. It is flexible
Magento is an open source platform. In other words, we could modify the source code as per our requirements and desire, which allows us to customize templates and achieve desired functionality.
Furthermore, Magento also allows third party integration for various purposes like importing products and much more. This flexibility is the biggest plus point of Magento as it makes easier to look and analyze performance of websites and also to get a real-time information.
2. It has many features that other platforms lack
Magento has a wide range of features which allows us to manage multiple stores, and support multiple locations, multiple language, multiple pricing and multiple currencies. Compare Magento vs Shopify, vs Woocommerce, vs Volusion or any other e-commerce platform and it stands out with its abundance of features.
For instance, with the help of Magento, you can vary your price of the specific product depending upon the group of customers. You can have a different price for your staff as well as a different price for VIPs. Moreover, the community version of Magento allows you to enjoy many features, which other e-commerce platforms lack. Therefore, it is one of the biggest pros of choosing Magento over other e-commerce platforms.
3. It has a large community of users
There is a large community of Magento users because it is one of the most used e-commerce platforms in the world. This has helped to ensure quick support. In addition, the large community has inspired to develop many extensions and plugins. As a result, if you have any problems, you are likely to get more support because there are countless resources to solve problems.
4. It is mobile friendly
A mobile friendly configuration is a must to ensure the success of e-commerce. According to one of the surveys, nearly one-fourth of online shoppers felt the need of the mobile friendly e-commerce platform. Online retailers cannot overlook the fact that internet browsing trend has shifted to mobile devices.
Magento is mobile friendly as it allows to create a mobile site without any difficulty and give best mobile viewing experience to the customer as far as possible. This has helped in the increase of sales and a lower bounce rate.
5. It’s scalable
When we start a small business, we do so, with a view to expand later in the future. As the business grows, our e-commerce platform must be able to handle the increased amount of products and sales. Some of the e-commerce platforms might not be able to handle this growth and may hinder the progress of company but Magento can handle with ease, from a handful of products to thousands of them.
In fact, Magento can approximately support up to five hundred thousands of products and thousands of transactions in an hour. It is a notable advantage because you can customize Magento without any constraints.
Cons
6. It’s expensive
Magento is available in many versions. The community version of Magento is free, while the enterprise version of Magento costs you more than fifteen thousand dollars approximately. Furthermore, Premium Enterprise version of Magento, targeted for large businesses costs you more than fifty thousand dollars approximately for a year.
Add a third party fee, if you can’t install the extension yourself. This would be an exorbitant venture. Hence, the cost it commands is the biggest drawback of otherwise one of the most popular e-commerce platforms.
7. It has few developers
Magento has a large community of users as well as developers. As a result, it is difficult to find authentic Magento developers. The main reason for this is the complex understanding that one needs to have in object oriented development and vast experience one should possess with core software.
Furthermore, Magento has a large system which possesses over twenty thousand files and two hundred data base tables. One needs a lot of time to master it. As a result, even if you are successful in finding a genuine developer, his prices are surely going to be sky high.
8. It is time consuming
Magento has a slow loading time. Therefore, customizations are pretty difficult to make, in comparison to other e-commerce platforms. It is also not easy to switch from another e-commerce platform to Magento because it imports the data at a very slow rate.
One reason behind this slow loading is due to its flexible architecture, which makes it complex and time-consuming to set it up. However, this is highly debated because only community version of Magento is slow at loading. In contrast, the enterprise and premium enterprise versions are quite fast.
9. Hosting
You should use a dedicated server to host Magento. Other normal hosting platforms should not be used to host it. Moreover, it should be configured in a server that you or your developer have proficiency in. Hence, there is a limit to hosting Magento.
Bulkiness is a prime reason behind this. Furthermore, optimization requires a lot of high-level skills and thinking. Hence, it is one of the biggest cons of Magento because it can lead to the crashing of your websites.
10. Bad product support
The product support for Magento is quite expensive because developers and consultant charge handsomely for Magento in comparison to WordPress. In addition, Magento forum support is not what you’d expect it to be. Official support forum of Magento is overrun with spam because of the lack of organized monitoring. This is one of the downsides of choosing Magento.
Imagine having a problem of your own regarding any issue about Magento and not finding any helpful solutions or worst falling prey to the scams. This could be really devastating.
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