Magento Development Pros and Cons :
Starting an On-line Store and selecting the right Shopping cart can be a bit daunting task . There are lots of Shopping carts available in the market like OpenCart,Zen Cart,Shopify, Magento CE, Magento EE and Magento Go etc . When compared to all of them my personal favourite is Magento CE due to fact that it is Open source and possess enormous possibilities for custom extensions. Some of the major Features of Magento CE are as follows:
1 Easy To Setup
2 Multi Store /Language website possible with some minimum modifications.
3 Advanced Back end Reporting
4 Active Community
5 Lots of Free and paid Plugin and Themes .
6 Catalogue Management is quite easy.
7 Owned by Ebay and currently one of the most powerful Shopping carts .
8 One of the most secure shopping carts .
9 Easily Integrated with EBAY/AMAZON/Facebook stores by Third party plugin.
10 Advanced Stock Management by ERP Plugins.
11 Easily supported by all major payment gateways like SAGEPAY/PAYPAL/Authorize.net etc
12 SEO Friendly Shopping Cart
If you have reasonable PHP Skills , Magento Development is not hard to learn . Incase not there are lost of Magento Development companies in London which offer affordable Magento Development Services. Magento Connect is the place you can get lots of Free extensions to further extend your Magento store functionality .
Inspite of all these advantages there are a few disadvantages which some Store owners experience with Magento stores. Below mentioned are the common issues with magento stores and appropriate solution:
Speed Issues :
Most of the Magento websites are too slow. Please make sure compilation and cache are enabled.
To Enable cache System > Cache Management, Select All button, then set the Actions drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of the table to ENABLE and press the Submit button right next to it. Then you'll see the status of all the options change to Enabled.
Compilation:
Compilation is another Issues which is responsible for slow Magento stores. Ensure the compilation is turned on
Navigate to System > Tools > Compilation page click RUN COMPILATION and click on ENABLE button.
GZIp Compression :
Make sure Gzip compression is Turned on . Take the Help of your Hosting provider . If you do not have access to .htaccess file .
If you want to do it here is the Doc
Starting an On-line Store and selecting the right Shopping cart can be a bit daunting task . There are lots of Shopping carts available in the market like OpenCart,Zen Cart,Shopify, Magento CE, Magento EE and Magento Go etc . When compared to all of them my personal favourite is Magento CE due to fact that it is Open source and possess enormous possibilities for custom extensions. Some of the major Features of Magento CE are as follows:
1 Easy To Setup
2 Multi Store /Language website possible with some minimum modifications.
3 Advanced Back end Reporting
4 Active Community
5 Lots of Free and paid Plugin and Themes .
6 Catalogue Management is quite easy.
7 Owned by Ebay and currently one of the most powerful Shopping carts .
8 One of the most secure shopping carts .
9 Easily Integrated with EBAY/AMAZON/Facebook stores by Third party plugin.
10 Advanced Stock Management by ERP Plugins.
11 Easily supported by all major payment gateways like SAGEPAY/PAYPAL/Authorize.net etc
12 SEO Friendly Shopping Cart
If you have reasonable PHP Skills , Magento Development is not hard to learn . Incase not there are lost of Magento Development companies in London which offer affordable Magento Development Services. Magento Connect is the place you can get lots of Free extensions to further extend your Magento store functionality .
Inspite of all these advantages there are a few disadvantages which some Store owners experience with Magento stores. Below mentioned are the common issues with magento stores and appropriate solution:
Speed Issues :
Most of the Magento websites are too slow. Please make sure compilation and cache are enabled.
To Enable cache System > Cache Management, Select All button, then set the Actions drop-down menu in the upper-left corner of the table to ENABLE and press the Submit button right next to it. Then you'll see the status of all the options change to Enabled.
Compilation:
Compilation is another Issues which is responsible for slow Magento stores. Ensure the compilation is turned on
Navigate to System > Tools > Compilation page click RUN COMPILATION and click on ENABLE button.
GZIp Compression :
Make sure Gzip compression is Turned on . Take the Help of your Hosting provider . If you do not have access to .htaccess file .
If you want to do it here is the Doc
############################################
## enable apache served files compression
## http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html#gzip
# Insert filter on all content
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
# Insert filter on selected content types only
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript
# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
Varnish/Redis Cache:
Make sure you have External cache like Varnish /Redish installed on Server. This can dramatically increase the website speed and Performance.
Dedicated Hosting:
If your on Shared hosting go for dedicated hosting , Magento is very Resource intensive and is very slow with shared hosting .
Database Server:
Have a separate Database Server . Possible also try to have a CDN as well.
Conclusion:
Overall I would say Magento is out of Box very good Shopping cart and lot better and advanced when compared to other like Opencart or Shopify.
Although some newbies may find it a bit hard to start with , but practice make a man perfect and Magento is worth your time !
Make sure you have External cache like Varnish /Redish installed on Server. This can dramatically increase the website speed and Performance.
Dedicated Hosting:
If your on Shared hosting go for dedicated hosting , Magento is very Resource intensive and is very slow with shared hosting .
Database Server:
Have a separate Database Server . Possible also try to have a CDN as well.
Conclusion:
Overall I would say Magento is out of Box very good Shopping cart and lot better and advanced when compared to other like Opencart or Shopify.
Although some newbies may find it a bit hard to start with , but practice make a man perfect and Magento is worth your time !