Magento

Read this Magento…

First off, I am not a coder. I am a business owner. Magento doesn’t think about the business owner, they only think about the coder. But guess who your customers are? Business owners. So start thinking about us when you design your platform.

Secondly, I pay for Enterprise version. I’m dishing out over 13k a year - about as much as many cars cost. So I have a right to be angry about this crap. And good Magento developers are expensive. I don’t want to pay over $100/hour for them to code in / add in simple things that should come out of the box.

Ok, so here’s my issues:
1) When you are working in the backend of Magento, there are no little question marks you can scroll over to explain a feature. Do I want this sale to be an anchor? What the hells an anchor? I have to google it, or search around the Magento site - a simple rollover explanation would suffice, but no. What if I want to delegate some inputting of products to an employee? Ah crap… might as well do it myself unless I want to train them for hours to navigate your system.

2) Reports - they are an insult to everyone. Why do you determine what I want to see in my reports? Shouldn’t I be able to play around with my data and draw my own conclusions? But I can’t… and for the “Best Sellers” - sure list only 5 product SKUs per day. I sold over 100, but you are telling me that the top 5 are the only important ones - that should be up to me. Almost every report sucks, because it’s missing important information. Can I download a list of all the products that were sold and each product’s selling price so I can run my own analysis? Nope, that report isn’t available. Can I create reports for what has sold by brand/vendor instead of by date? Nope, apparently Magento has decided that’s not important.

3) Can I search my members by secondary email address? Nope, not possible either.

Damnit Magento, give us control over our data and let us arrange it how we want it. Have you ever heard of UX - User Experience? For people who make a complicated eCommerce platform, you suck at making it better to help you drive even more sales. If you fixed some simple problems you would likely gain a great deal of market share as more and more businesses go online… but instead you are too damn lazy.

Figure it out.

There are many more issues, but I’m over writing about them. I know some jackoff will write here “We appreciate your feedback and will take this into consideration for future versions”.

I don’t care - I’m stuck using your crap for now anyways. I just hope this is read by someone who gives enough of a crap to make some changes.

Adam,

I’m the developer for an e-commerce retailer, and believe me, I feel your pain, possibly more than you.  Your statement that Magento was built for coders is, while an understandable sentiment, is actually not true.  As a software engineer, I’ve found Magento to be one of the worst pieces of software I’ve ever looked at in my 12+ years in the industry.  I and everyone in the company I work for is very aware of its deficiencies.  We’ve been putting up with it since mid-2009.  It’s now 2013.  This past September I said, “Enough is enough!”, and decided to embark on writing our own e-commerce engine that blows Magento away in every respect.  We’ve been sprinting ever since, and it’s nearing completion.  For what it’s worth, I benchmarked our current Magento and compared it to our engine.  Magento can handle about 7-10 requests per second; ours can handle 350+ requests per second, and we haven’t done any aggressive optimizations yet.  This is not an advertisement, though, since we never plan to sell it; it’s in-house only.  I guess the takeaway that I can give you is that if you’re serious and in it for the long haul, write your own.  It will cost you less in the end, and you’ll be able to dictate whatever feature you want.  Just make real sure that whoever develops it is an employee, lives locally, and works in-house; don’t outsource the effort to someone you’ll never see or hear from after it’s complete.  My sympathies go to you, inasmuch as we, ourselves, have felt the sting and frustration of trying to use this product.  Good luck.

magento fuck

If an enterprise customer is complaining imagine what users of the community edition (the neglected son, these days) have to live thru.

Too bad there are no alternatives (yet) that match magento in flexibility. IF you do have a coder to implement the changes you need AND don’t mind PAYING for dedicated server hardware, Magento is still unmatched.

Unless, of course, your budget for ecommerce software is in the 6 figures. Unless, of course, I am wrong and people will list here viable alternatives.

It’s too bad Magento grew up and decided to go the Microsoft way (”Once Microsoft gained a dominant market position, it completely and utterly took its customers for granted. It became arrogant and complacent, causing customers to feel unappreciated and victimized.”).