by Adam M. | Sep 26, 2011 | eCommerce Platforms
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 eCommerce. 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).
Final Thoughts
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 eCommerce platforms that I’ve ever worked with. It’s important, though, to at least know what you’re getting yourself into.
For more information on Magento, give us a call! We’re happy to help with all your Magento needs.
Check out this related article for more intel on Maganto
+ Benefits of Magento (redstage.com)
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+ Redstage Ranked Top B2B Magento Developers of 2018, Globally
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+ Is My Store Good Enough? What it means to give shoppers a frictionless experience.
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+ Email Marketing Tips for Retailers
by Agbi B. | Sep 20, 2011 | Uncategorized
No matter how big or small your business might be, as long as you have the right marketing strategy at hand, your success is almost guaranteed. With so many online marketing strategies, tips and advice constantly revolving around you, it might be hard to make your pick. This piece should help you come across some useful advice and guidelines on how to select the most effective online marketing strategies and avoid the extra hassle.
Online Marketing Strategies: DOs
It is recommended you fine tune your search engine optimization for your site, including a better management of your HTML, web design and architecture, content, linking and site customization. Create content that is well written, do not overlook grammar and spelling mistakes, and always back up everything you say using powerful arguments, research data and statistics, and plain facts. Throw the focus on creating excellent lists of features, advantages, or benefits and stop worrying about word count.
If you are familiar with the Hummingbird changes, topics are acting like keywords in result pages. It is therefore recommended to try to make each page stand as a topic on its own. Try to avoid creating several pages on the same topic just to obtain the optimization you are aiming for various keywords. Instead, you could be creating longer forms of content which could be covering all of your ideas and keywords all at once.
It is also recommended you use good title tags and headers that are fully optimized – Google could be soon rewriting title tags using more algorithms. Try to test some HMTL changes to the same text Google will show in the SERP. Look at all efficiency indicators and whenever you notice an improvement, use a title tag optimizer to help you out.
Social media is excellent for attracting new visitors and clients and direct interaction is the key to success. As a small business manager you can make full use of social media to discover your prospects and successfully initiate business talks on the spot, in real time. As a big business owner, you can better profile your potential customers and use social media networks as huge data sources. It is also recommended that you improve your online reputation by staying on top of those posts that are mentioning your business.
Online Marketing Strategies: DON’Ts
It is recommended that you do not use a keyword strategy while relying on competitive information that is not fully accurate. Avoid using Google AdWords data in order to get a keyword competitive analysis, as you could be solely generating flawed conclusions. Do not sound too personal, critical, or aggressive when replying to social media posts. Also, try to not get stuck on the same obsolete web design no one (successful) uses anymore and constantly update, customize, and optimize everything. Do not lose the focus on mobile responsive sites and also do not forget to breathe from time to time! Play your favorite casino games online; download Cosmik Casino or use the instant play alternative, become a registered member and enjoy the current 5,555 welcome bonus.
by Adam M. | Sep 19, 2011 | Uncategorized
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 eCommerce 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: https://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: https://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.
For more information on Magento, please call us at 888.335.2747.
by Agbi B. | Sep 17, 2011 | Uncategorized
Everyone is looking to boost sales one way or the other. Here at RedStage we strive to permanently provide you with the ideal combo of virtual tools and ideas to help you reach your desired numbers faster than ever. He have got the right kind of experience, expertise, and dedicated team of people to work with you and for you. Today we decided to share with you some inspiring tips on how to increase your sales using a few simple ideas. For further assistance feel free to get in touch with us.
Clean Your Home Page
It is advisable to only provide one product or service at a time on your website’s home page. Statistics show that displaying fewer products in a single location and attaching longer and more effective descriptions to them will generate better results. Customers and simple site visitors will much rather see a smaller number of products on a single page and read more about each of them, rather than see a lot of products/services briefly presented on your site. Throw the focus on the benefits and advantages of using the respective products and services and try to formulate your copy as to answer potential customer questions.
You will save more time, generate quicker sales, and keep your site visitors/buyers happy. No one really likes to write emails asking about an unspecified detail of a product they are interested in buying. They will solely be wasting their time and spend energy and competition might very well have all the details nicely listed on their site. The best way to try this approach is to create a brand new sale letter using this few products; pattern and test in on your targeted audience for a while and see what sort of results it generates.
Use Hover Ads For Greater Impact
It is also recommended to use hover ads that can significantly increase your sales. They are superior to pop-up ads due to the fact they cannot be blocked. They are also capable of displaying much larger portions of information including details on your one-time limited offers and special discounts. Your targeted audience is going to count among the first to learn all about your new promotions with the help of these ads.
Change The Position Of Your Opt-Ins
You can create a much larger list of your most loyal subscribers while changing the position of your opt-in offers. The opt-in offer is going to allow you to obtain the email addresses of your customers and help you build your powerful email lists, so you can constantly keep up with subscribers. You will need to play your cards right and create powerful bonds and friendships with them, so their loyalty can eventually turn into bigger sales.
Long, boring sales letter few people actually read till the very end are not as successful as opt-in offers. Place these helpful tools on the top left side of each site page and your site visitors will immediately be attracted by the writing and act accordingly.
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