Magento go!

Magento go!

We’ve just launched our first Magento online shop, MacBrayne Wines, and it’s been a really interesting experience.

We first became aware of Magento about 5 years ago when we were building one of our first big e-commerce websites. At the time we thought it had promise but felt a bit too slow and wasn’t quite sufficiently eveolved, so we used ClickCart Pro instead.

A somewhat mixed experience with ClickCart led us to use CubeCart for our next big online shop. Then our own CMS grew its own product catalogue and e-commerce modules.

Our CMS is great for adding small shops to websites that do other things, but it’s not really aimed at creating pure shopping sites with user accounts to track order history, and high-end e-commerce stuff like upselling and cross-selling, so we’ve recently had cause to head back to Magento.

…And it’s very good. Lots of great features out of the box, some really nice off-the-shelf designs, and quite nice from a technical perspective as well. The user interface isn’t always as fast as I’d like – there’s a lot to it, 16 pages involved in creating a single product profile – but it’s always the case that the more flexible you make a system, the more complex it is to administer.

The only real down-side we’ve found it that editing content on areas outside of the product catalogue is really not intuitive. The “static blocks” can be a bit of a nightmare – don’t ask unless you need to!

Also, we briefly tried the hosted “Magento Go” system (lives on their server instead of ours, the idea being that there’s no need to involve a programmer) and were really disappointed: the design options aren’t great and the system is incredibly slow at the moment – bad from an administrator’s perspective, worse for the customer.

So in summary: need a big online shop? Get us to build you a Magento website, it’s great. Need a flexible, user-friendly website where your profile, blog and portfolio are at least as important as selling stuff? Noisegate CMS will suit you much better.