The old saying says “The distance from love to hate is just one step”. This is exactly what I feel about Magento – an open source eCommerce platform. I’ve already spent a couple of month using it for online store project and I have this mixed feeling about it.
The reason I picked Magento was because of positive feedback I heard from others. The set of features it offers “out of box” is amazing and you are getting it all for FREE. You can taste Magento through this demo.
One particular feature that I love is layered navigation where you can filter your products by common sets of attributes. This is very useful when you have to offer a large selection of products. For example if you sell shoes, your website visitor can narrow it down to Mens shoes made by Kenneth Cole of Black color. In this case “Mens”, “Kenneth Cole” and “Black” are all different attributes that could be filtered by.
The first time I was upset with Magento was when I tried to bulk import special type of product (configurable product) and discovered that there is no native support for this. Thanks to the great community around Magento I was able to find the solution but it was such a waste of time.
Another thing that drove me crazy was the glitches after importing large amount of products. After I imported about 1,000 products my favorite layered navigation feature just stopped working. I wasn’t alone, the whole community was complaining about the same issue for more than a year. And the only way to resolve this issue was through the guy who found a work around. Chris McKee was so kind that he even worked on my hosting remotely to resolve the issue absolutely for FREE. Thanks Chris for helping me and many others!
There were many other little things that I wouldn’t mention here. But I’m proud that I made it through. I’ve imported around 9,000 products and the next step is to customize the design. Will keep you posted on the progress.
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