Our current site is all static html with no database and can be seen at http://www.gatedepot.com. We're looking to move the entire site with approximately 5000 products over to an e-commerce system. We have another site that we've built using magento, but my experience with Magento has led me to believe it is not the right choice for us. We like to customize the site to work they way we want. While Magento allows us to do that, it is a very time consuming process. Also, the way magento code works is very complex and it has been a struggle getting up to speed in order to accomplish the customization.
Another issue is that our company is too small to pay for a developer with enough programming experience to effectively tackle magento. While I've gotten a good grasp of it, in the event I leave for somewhere else, my employer may be stuck in a bad place. Sorry if this is more info than required. Just wanted to explain clearly why I have concerns about Magento.
Furthermore, we don't want to change our current site too much and lose our returning customers. While I definitely would like to improve the overall appearance of the site, we'd like to keep the overall organization and the way information is presented.
Some aspects I think we need are Configurable products, quick load time, google and paypal checkout, easily upload images, easily manage categories, ups shipping. If they have a good way to handle freight shipping, that would be a big plus. I have a longer list, but those are the most important. We don't use any of the sales reports, inventory management, newsletter features in Magento. We use google analytics and google base.
The top two I'm looking at right now are Presta Shop and Tomato Cart. I haven't looked into how easy they are to customize yet. I welcome any advice or suggestions you have from your experience. If you think my analysis of Magento is incorrect, that's up for discussion as well.
9 Answers
Armando Roggio says:
Dardub you have a static site with more than 5,000 products and you think that Magento is too complex? :-)
Look, Magento is a great platform, certainly the leader right now in open source. But if you are not familiar with its architecture, it can be a bit of a challenge. For example, it is based on a Model View Controller architecture that can take some getting used to. Also, Magento uses an entity, attribute, value (EAV) database architecture, which is not the easiest thing to query--FishPig does a nice job of explaining--but overall is a better way to manage site data.
Next, no matter which platform you pick, you are going to spend some time figuring out where the parts and pieces fit, so to speak. For example, I think Shopify is a great solution, but their Liquid markup language gave me a headache for a couple of days, and in the end, it was not as flexible as I would have liked.
Ok, I will get off of my soap box. You might also try...
Ilya Vassilevsky says:
I'd also recommend downloading the free version of Avactis and giving it a spin. Ain't easiest thing to configure, but you really can tweak just everything.
dardub says:
@Armando - Yeah well I'm fairly new to this company and am tasked with bringing the static site to a database. I don't even like to deal with the static site, it's such a mess.
I've gotten the hang of magento, but there is still so much to learn. Some modifications I can do quickly, but some simple changes still seem to take forever. And then there is still the problem with hiring new people and being able to afford someone that can handle magento.
One package that has jumped out at me is opencart. I like how simple everything is, the backend, the code, it just seems to all work. The only thing that worries me is the lack of documentation which is the biggest problem with magento. Although it is much more straightforward and doesn't require the amount of documentation magento does.
Using WP is intriguing to me. But how would it be at handling a site with so many products?
dardub says:
Lemonstand looks promising, I'll be taking a closer look at that. Thanks Armando.
Also I guess another headache magento caused recently was when we were trying to do mass updates of most of our products. Just updating one attribute for 2000 products doing small blocks at a time took us two whole days to complete. Only because it would sit there for half an our or more while writing to the db.
Armando Roggio says:
@dardub, Were you using Magento's import feature? It works great. On one project that I am working on right now, we are connecting the inventory management system for a small chain with Magento's import feature via a cron job. Magento will check more than 90,000 SKUs daily and update based on any changes. No humans required.
Magento's built in field matching tool makes this really easy.
dardub says:
@Armando - I created a customized module for google base, and I had created an attribute to hold the google product types. We were using the mass update to update blocks of products for the new attribute. My point is that Magento's back end is so slow compared to all the competitors that it can make product management difficult. I suppose if you are using a 3rd party inventory management software than it helps with that issue.
I have kind of a side topic question. Let me know if this should be a new topic. As I mentioned before we have a static site with over 5000 products. The biggest hurdle will be to accurately put all the products into a database. And the individual products are listed in different locations on the site with different attributes. (Like I said it's a mess.) Instead of trying to import them all manually by hand or data mine the products and then spend a year fixing all the products, would it be possible to have a full cart that works as a cart for the static products and also manually input products into a database? Then we would slowly move over all the products onto a db. Does that make sense? Maybe you have a suggestion for something better?
dardub says:
I'm not sure if I phrased it clearly, let me a try again.
We would use a full package like magento or lemonstand, but integrate it into the static site so that we would be using magento for the checkout process only. Then over the course of the year we would be entering products into magento and having a mix of static product and products from the database. We would most likely do this migration one category at a time.
Armando Roggio says:
dardub, I most confess, I don't really think that will work. I would suggest adding all of the products to a database first. I know it is a pain in the neck, but I think it will be the better and faster solution in the long run.
Alvin Brown says:
dardub, I agree with Armando... Magento, Lemonstand, WP-ecommerce... heck, they all can do the job to some extent, but truly it is about the developer's proficiency in coding/programming on both the front/back ends (no pun intended).
It really makes sense to spend the man hours on the front end of this type of project to get the products into a database. Yes, I know your hands will be aching for a few weekends. I'm currently in the midst of helping a haircare product manufacturer come online with roughly 3,000 products and everything is in an 'unorganized' mess in Excel... so I feel your pain, but at some point, the company is going to have to bite the bullet and spend time correcting the static mess into a dynamic/scalable site. 3,000 product took me 4 full days to knock out, but I got a dev environment completed... product requirements spec'ed, ecom software/platform chosen, products loaded into database, and company online with a comprehensive shopping cart completing orders (excluding design).
Personally, I've had to work on projects with clients using Magento, osCommerce, ZenCart, and X-Cart. I personally love working with osCommerce and ZenCart, but using those or any other platform really depends upon your proficiency in coding/programming.
Dardub, here's a great starting point:
I recommend looking at what products are making the company money (highest margins) and use those products and their respective parameters to spec out what type of ecom software/platform to use -- moving the respective products into the database first. If you can get a dev environment working with the top 10 products... you should be good to go in moving forward with other products (i.e. at least the company won't be losing money from the top tier products!) ;)
Do you have a spreadsheet of product(s) with the necessary information? A few quick Excel shortcuts and poof... you'll have a query ready in a matter of minutes, meaning less than 10-15 minutes at most depending upon your proficiency in using Excel. Now how long it takes to run the query on db, that really depends on your host, server memory, and processing speed.
Let's start here with answering the question above, and we'll see where this goes... hope we get you off on the right foot. :)
Side note: Another thing you'll have to consider is the SEO capabilities of your ecom software/platform in comparison to your current website's information architecture. In short, you'll have to make sure to have mod_rewrite or 301/302 Redirects from the old product page to the new product pages. You'll take a hit from an SEO standpoint, but not as bad if you choose not to use 301/302 redirects. But we'll discuss this later...
