Anyone use Magento?

[smo]

We've recently comissioned a complete overhaul of several of our websites onto the Magento platform with a singular admin back end which is one of the bonuses of Magento over other systems.

It seems that opencart is popular around here, but does anyone else use Magento?

[tlworkwear]

Im looking at the possibility of Magento as a web designer friend of mine swears by it, not too sure how user friendly it is though for people like me who are not so tech savvy. What do you think of it?

[smo]

We love ours, its incredibly powerful but as you say not great for new users. Loads of plug-ins and add-ons though and many many more features than other carts. Does need heafty hosting though as its very intensive software on resources.

[tlworkwear]

Thanks for the quick reply smo. Yeah thats what I have been told as well, I'm still in two minds about which one to go for but I guess I will just have to do a little more research and choose what I am more comfortable with in the end

[Johnny]

OpenCart is fairly simple to get to grips with from an admin point of view. It only took me a day to figure out how to add basic setup costs into a product.
Magento is a real mind-blow until you get to grips with it (and I haven't yet after 3 years), lots of facilities for upselling, cross-selling, and if I'm right every variation of a product has to be set up as an sku product? Whereas OpenCart you just add additional options.
Magento can handle thousands and thousands of products, and as above is very powerful. But there's tonnes of stuff in it I'd never use.
J.

[smo]

You can add options in magento without seperate SKU's, but its definately a mine field of options!

[mel777]

Magento in my opinion is a beast and once tamed is exceptional. I do recommend though getting a full page caching module as Magento CE does not support full page caching by default (only EE does). These typically start from free (Varnish) to £500ish but worth the investment. I developed a site that without caching took 5.5 seconds to load after caching implemented and optimised this was 0.8 seconds.

However it's only downfall are the coders out there. Some are great most are sloppy so when you start adding extensions you get conflicts due to this. This is where you need a budget set aside for Magento. Whether it be hosting, maintenance, upgrades or custom work it all costs. Also bare in mind to get the most out of Magento do not host on shared platforms.

Also be careful about choosing templates for Magento as once again quite a lot are coded wrong off the bat so you will always be spending out to fix the issues.