E-commerce has dramatically altered the face of the business world. Nowadays, you can do most of your business with a few clicks of a mouse or a few touches on your mobile set.
While there are many big players in e-commerce or e-business, Magento has been the front runner in the online business world – all due to the number of good things it offers. However, it is not devoid of disadvantages. Below, we have compiled a list of pros and cons of choosing Magento for an e-commerce store for you to weigh and decide whether you’d want Magneto for your e-commerce.
Pros
1. It is flexible
Magento is an open-source platform. In other words, we could modify the source code per our requirements and desire, allowing us to customize templates and achieve the desired functionality.
Furthermore, Magento also allows third-party integration for various purposes like importing products. This flexibility is the most significant plus point of Magento as it makes it easier to look at and analyze the performance of websites and get real-time information.
2. It has many features that other platforms lack
Magento has a wide range of features that allows us to manage multiple stores and support multiple locations, multiple languages, multiple pricing, and multiple currencies. Compare Magento vs. Shopify, Woocommerce, Volusion, or any other e-commerce platform; it stands out with its abundance of features.
For instance, with the help of Magento, you can vary the price of a specific product depending upon the group of customers. You can have a different price for your staff and a different price for VIPs. Moreover, the community version of Magento allows you to enjoy many features which other e-commerce platforms lack. Therefore, it is one of the biggest pros of choosing Magento over other e-commerce platforms.
3. It has a large community of users
There is a large community of Magento users because it is one of the most used e-commerce platforms in the world. This has helped to ensure quick support. In addition, the large community has inspired me to develop many extensions and plugins. As a result, if you have problems, you will likely get more support because there are countless resources to solve problems.
4. It is mobile friendly
A mobile-friendly configuration is a must to ensure the success of e-commerce. According to one of the surveys, nearly one-fourth of online shoppers felt the need for a mobile-friendly e-commerce platform. Online retailers cannot overlook that the internet browsing trend has shifted to mobile devices.
Magento is mobile-friendly as it allows the creation of a mobile site without any difficulty and gives the best mobile viewing experience to the customer as far as possible. This has helped in the increase of sales and a lower bounce rate.
5. It’s scalable
When we start a small business, we intend to expand later in the future. As the business grows, our e-commerce platform must be able to handle the increased amount of products and sales. Some e-commerce platforms might be unable to drive this growth and hinder the company’s progress, but Magento can control it easily, from a handful of products to thousands of them.
Magento can support up to five hundred thousand products and thousands of transactions in an hour. It is a notable advantage because you can customize Magento without any constraints.
Cons
6. It’s expensive
Magento is available in many versions. The community version of Magento is complimentary, while the enterprise version of Magento costs you approximately fifteen thousand dollars. Furthermore, the Premium Enterprise version of Magento, targeted at large businesses, costs you about fifty thousand dollars annually.
Add a third-party fee if you can’t install the extension yourself. This would be an absurd venture. Hence, the cost it commands is the biggest drawback of otherwise, one of the most popular e-commerce platforms.
7. It has few developers
Magento has a large community of users as well as developers. As a result, it isn’t easy to find authentic Magento developers. The main reason for this is the complex understanding one needs to have in object-oriented development and the vast experience one should possess with the core software.
Furthermore, Magento has an extensive system with over twenty thousand files and two hundred database tables. One needs a lot of time to master it. As a result, even if you successfully find a genuine developer, his prices will surely be sky high.
8. It is time-consuming
Magento has a slow loading time. Therefore, customizations are pretty tricky compared to other e-commerce platforms. It is also not easy to switch from another e-commerce platform to Magento because it imports the data at a prolonged rate.
One reason behind this slow loading is its flexible architecture, making it complex and time-consuming. However, this is highly debated because only the community version of Magento is slow at loading. In contrast, the enterprise and premium enterprise versions are pretty fast.
9. Hosting
It would help if you used a dedicated server to host Magento. Other standard hosting platforms should not be used to host it. Moreover, it should be configured in a server in which you or your developer are proficient. Hence, there is a limit to hosting Magento.
Bulkiness is a prime reason behind this. Furthermore, optimization requires a lot of high-level skills and thinking. Hence, it is one of the biggest cons of Magento because it can lead to the crashing of your websites.
10. Bad product support
The product support for Magento is quite expensive because developers and consultants charge handsomely for Magento in comparison to WordPress. In addition, Magento forum support is not what you’d expect it to be. The official support forum of Magento is overrun with spam because of the lack of organized monitoring. This is one of the downsides of choosing Magento.
Imagine having a problem of your own regarding any issue about Magento and not finding any helpful solutions or falling prey to the scams. This could be devastating.
