Archive for the ‘E-commerce’ Category
Magento PROS and CONS
Posted on: April 9, 2013
- In: E-commerce | Platforms
- 1 Comment
Stories are told about the greatness of the free and mighty Magento e-commerce platform. There is much talking about Magento in comparison with other eCommerce platforms but in this article we thought it would be a good time to talk about Magento on its own. Now we’ll talk about the pros of Magento and some great ,positive things to expect while using it. Later on we’ll discuss another side of the medal which of course is there as well 
The Pros of Magento:
Out of the box features: Magento boasts some of the most impressive features straight out of the box, including:
- Marketing / promotional tools
- Search engine optimization
- Catalog management
- International support
- Shipping (multiple addresses, multiple shipments, free shipping, etc.)
- Analytics and reporting
- Site management
- Catalog browsing
- Mobile commerce
- Payment (multiple payment options, payment extensions available, etc.)
- Customer accounts
Open Source: We think it’s common knowledge how much software developers love open source software. Magento Community is completely free to download, plus every version of Magento is able to be built upon and tailored to the specific needs of developers.
Administrative Interface: As we suppose Magento has the best administrative interface of any open source eCommerce platform. Magento provides a customer-friendly interface that is also a very flexible solution. The out of the box features go hand in hand with the power of the administrative interface, namely the features of order and customer management, catalog management, and analytics and reporting data.
Community and Updates: Magento has continued to thrive as a community with their number of users increasing dramatically over the past few years. Magento likely has the largest and fastest growing community of developers of any eCommerce platform. Magento also has continued to release new updates and versions of all three Magento editions on schedule.
Extensions: The extensions available for Magento help set it apart from all of the other eCommerce platforms. Magento’s core development team set out to create Magento as one of the most extendable eCommerce platforms available. Magento has the architecture necessary to allow its functionality to be extended while still remaining stable and maintaining its elegant looks.
The Cons of Magento:
While there are hundreds of the Magento-lovers, I am also willing to provide an objective view of the eCommerce platform which has some negative sides as well. Now I would love to cover the cons since we discussed the pros of Magento earlier above in the article. Below each con, we also provide the best solution, so don’t get too worried about getting scared off by the information below.
Speed: One of the main complaints people have about Magento is its speed. Magento has been known to be quite slow. Magento was designed to be the most extendable eCommerce system available, which is still the case today. In order for the system to work efficiently despite the extensions added to it, the system was created in such a way that isolates each feature so that changing that feature (via an extension) does not affect any other part of the system. The result of which is an immense number of files in many different folders.
The solution: Get a good host that specializes in Magento eCommerce sites. As would be expected, if you try to use Magento on an incapable server, of course it will be slow. If you have a dedicated server and your site still runs slowly, the problem is likely due to a custom theme, a custom query, or your extensions.
Documentation: Magento, as an open source platform, falls victim to the typical issue of not being well-documented. There are manuals for Magento available for purchase, but may not be of much use because the system is full of unique terminology.
The solution: If you’re having trouble with the administration side of running your site, you should look into Magento-specific training. Find a firm or developer group that has extensive experience with all the versions of Magento that can help you get the most out of Magento.
Updates: We talked about the large community and the timely and on-schedule release of updates earlier. While this can be a definite pro of Magento, it can also be a downfall because of how often updates are released since an update will sometimes cause something that was functioning just fine to have a glitch after installing the update.
The solution: Hire an experienced development team to make sure that your Magento site is always using appropriate extensions and is developed using Magento-suitable practices. Also, if you’re worried, go through your upgrade process in a separate development environment with a Magento expert available to make sure the glitches are fixed before your site goes live.
Complexity / Cost: One of the other complaints we hear about Magento is that it can be too complex for people who don’t have much development experience. In addition, if you’re interested in creating a more extensive online store, you’ll likely need to use Magento Professional (starting at $2,995 per year) or Magento Enterprise (starting at $12,990 per year). If you need a large store and you don’t have any development experience, using Magento would require you to spend money on the yearly costs, as well as on the web development firm you hire to create your store.
The solution: Make Altabel your go-to Magento developers. With our dedicated developers and experienced project managers, we’ll keep your costs as low as possible by giving you exactly what you need and nothing you don’t.
Please don’t misunderstand me here. I am not saying Magento is bad ecommerce platform. What I am saying, is that Magento does not have a place for every level of ecommerce store and that users require training. Our advice to consult a professional with Magento experience, if you’re considering Magento for you platform and take note of the following:
• Don’t get caught up in the sales speak and try to ignore the shiny default template
• Remember you’ll need to set aside a great deal of time to learn the administration area – you may need training here
• Magento is not for every niche/business. The feature set and size of Magento implies you have a high volume of and complicated product variations
• Remember that due to the complexity of Magento, you’ll no doubt pay a premium for updates where a plugin will not suffice
Let us know What are your views on this matter in the comments section below. We are looking forward to a discussion on this important topic.
Kind regards,
Polina Mikhan – Business Development Manager (LI page)
Polina.Mikhan@altabel.com
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
Best Free Open Source E-commerce CMSs: Magento, X-Cart, OpenCart, Zen-Cart, Nopcommerce , etc.
Posted on: February 19, 2013
- In: E-commerce | Open Source
- 4 Comments
Ecommerce is a term used to denote a type of business where purchasing , selling and exchanging goods and services is conducted over electronic systems such as Internet and other computer networks. Since 1991, the year when the Internet became open for commercial use, it has become possible for customers to electronically exchange goods and services with no barriers of time or distance and e-commerce has started to develop.
If you would like to implement an ecommerce website it can be useful to take a look at the following list of open source ecommerce CMS which can help you to select the appropriate ecommerce platform for your project/s.
In my article I’ve tried to perform some investigation and identify what are the advantages and disadvantages of these CMSs. So let’s have a closer look at the list J:
1) Magento takes the first place. The coding is based on the latest PHP 5 object oriented coding standards and Zend framework. Without doubt, the platform is a huge success thanks to its feature-rich administration panel, huge flexibility over the design, layout, control and feel and other qualities allow to handle large inventories, more complex functionality, big number of in-built features and themes and exceptional technical support. Also I`d like to draw your attention to the fact that Varian, the company that backs the cart is very active in updating the code and fixing bugs. All these factors make Magento a truly established leader in ecommerce software that powers some of the most innovative ecommerce stores online. But as you know , there is always a fly in the ointment and this CMS has a couple of disadvantages: it requires a good high end server; has heavily layered and overly complicated coding style; requires a lot of time to learn and do customizations; it`s fairly slow. However all these disadvantages do not prevent Magento of being on the first place in our list.
2) X-Cart. It is one of the most competitively priced and easy to modify e-commerce platforms. X-Cart is commercially supported and has very few bugs (I doubt if there are any indeed), it uses smarty templates system which many programmers like to work with for laying out the web site. Unfortunately the solution has licensing fees for system and some add-on modules and the price can be really high. However the core open source platform can be downloaded for free (either X-Cart Gold or X-Cart Pro).
3) Zen Cart – I may call – the art of e-commerce. Free, user-friendly e-commerce software. The ecommerce web site design program was created by a group of like-minded shop owners, who believed that the projects and design eCommerce-sites could and should be different. Zen Cart has a very nice wide array of features based on Oscommerce but has gone its own path. It has no licensing fees, it is stable, has many Oscommerce contributions already installed, and all these factors certainly please the audience. Still sometimes it`s not possible to use Oscommerce contributions, because they must be converted to Zen Cart, and the admin interface may seem a little messy in certain areas because of contributions installed.
4) OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. The CMS offers an ‘out of the box’ solution with minimal manual intervention and configuration. OpenCart is an excellent choice for anyone looking to get started with selling online quickly and easily, with a wide array of extensions, both free and paid too, there is plenty of opportunity to customise your store cost effectively to suit your business needs. Their own website is clean, easy to navigate, clear and concise – plus easy to find support, tips or anything else you might be looking for. And as such, you can find similar practice deployed into their ecommerce software.
5) PrestaShop. It is the most reliable, flexible Open-source e-commerce software and one of the most favoured solutions for businesses when diving into the etail world. It’s highly recommended by the users. Using this CMS you can even manage and edit your products and images with the WYSIWYG editing tool and also customise your online store and send and receive payments to your PayPal or bank account. Still the core Prestashop lacks many of the basic fundamentals of ecommerce, it also provides the core install with a ridiculous amount of modules already plugged into the system (whether you want them or not), some of which have been half integrated into the core rather than relying of the 3rd party developers module CSS or JavaScript. There are also countless bugs and issues with the core.
6) osCommerce – a solution for creating an online store. It is free under the GNU General Public License . The product includes a lot of opportunities “in the box” (has the most available number of contributions and modifications, recent security update brings osCommerce up to date with MySQL 5 and PHP 5), allowing the owners of online stores to install, configure and maintain the service with a minimum of effort for free and without restrictions. Still it can take a lot of time and money to install all the contributions the customer wants (add-ons), and there is no graphic template system that means it is harder to modify the design.
7) Nopcommerce. Nopcommerce is a relatively new script online store and it is ASP.Net solution . I may tell you in confidence J that one of our recent projects was connected with this CMS: we`ve transferred the e-shop to Nopcommerce CMS with the possibility for synchronization of data from the web service (here you may find the description of the project). During the project implementation we noticed such advantages of the system as ease of deployment, integration of live chat, text messages on sales and contacts. Still a couple of little disadvantages were taken into consideration too: Microsoft licensing is required, the platform has some bugs needed to be fixed and support is rather weak.
Hope it will be of interest and helpful to you, in case your experience shows another picture and you have anything to add, I will be happy to read about your comments.
Kind regards,
Elvira Golyak – Business Development Manager (LI page)
Elvira.Golyak@altabel.com | Skype ID: elviragolyak
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
- In: Cloud | E-commerce
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Cloud technologies seem to be a modern trend-they are talked over at all the conferences, that are by some means connected with the Internet, are discussed in business press and on TV. It looks like another modern technological gimmick for Twitter, Facebook, various CRM and ERP systems, eAccountancy etc. Meanwhile, does cloud usage bring any benefit to business sites that do not provide hi-tech services?
In this article I will try to determine the benefits from using the cloud for the most popular business in the Internet – eCommerce. We will try to understand, if there is sense for a webstore owner to consider the possibility of transfer into the cloud.
In a classical data center there is possible such a situation, when there are no sufficient resources, which means the project loses the users who were not able to get access to it. It entails losing profit as well. On the other hand, when the load decreases, vacant resources stand idle, thus expenses for infrastructure support turn out to be wasted.
Let’s calculate lost profit for a hypothetic web-store. On the condition of having 10 customers per hour and average basket cost 100 dollars, one hour of down time will cost 1000 dollars. I’m not even talking about reputational risks – a consumer, who went to the rival during the down time, may never be back again. He also may lure his friends and acquaintances to another site.
Windows Azure allows developers to realize automatic addition and cutting off the resources, if necessary, through the special mechanism of resources management. It goes without saying that the owner of the site can add and cut off the resources manually using special portal of Windows Azure management.
Fatal failure, leading to the loss of all data or even a part of them, can entail eBusiness burst-up. Thus, reliability turns out to be even more important than lost profit from possible down times. In the cloud data duplicate automatically and store on different physical resources to secure the site owner from possible losses. Moreover, clouds allow storing the data even on geographically spaced sites. For example, Windows Azure automatically stores up to three data copies, at the same time it allows distributing data in Europe, America or Asia. It secures the data from serious failures.
When is it worth using the cloud?
1. Periodical load
In case the load happens at some definite time (working/off-hours), or definite days of the week (work days/ weekends), a site always faces the situation of resources idleness, when there are no load peaks. Consequently, it leads to extra expenses on unusable infrastructure.
2. Peaking load
Seasonal sales, holidays, promo actions lead to peaking site loads. Such loads are difficult to be predicted, while losses from possible down times or site irresponsiveness may be really huge.
3. Constant load growth
In case of constant load growth it is necessary to add resources. At the same time if load growth can not be precisely predicted, a site often lacks resources (site down time, failures), or there emerge lots of unusable resources (wasted expenses)
Cloud cost
For the most part of simple sites the cloud turns out to be more expensive than a usual hosting. At the same time cloud cost is explained by reliability of storing data, failures security, possibilityof elastic expansion and decrease of usable resources. Actual expenses depend on the site itself, its load characteristics, and can be calculated with the help of TCO Calculator.
Despite being more expensive, cloud hosting turns out to be more reasonable for most web shops, where constant availability and high quality service are really important.
Has anyone already transferred his/her site to the cloud? Please, share your experience and impressions, it would be really interesting to learn!
Thank you,
Nadya Klim
Business Development Manager
Altabel Group – Professional Software Development
