Adobe Commerce Reviews

The Supercircuits website was running on an custom-developed ASP.Net ecommerce platform, which I inherited when I joined the company. Over time it had become increasingly unwieldy, hard to update, and buggy, and I was desperate to move on to a more modern ecommerce platform.

I'd been interested in Magento for a while as it appeared to meet all of our functional needs as well as being very affordable, and so, after a short period of due diligence, we embarked on an implementation of the Enterprise Edition.

Little did I know then, that it would take over a year to launch the site. But that's what happens when you combine a very small team, with a lot of operational responsibilities, with the requirement to integrate with an internal order management system that's about 10 years old.

Lesson learned #1: If you are about to embark on a major Magento implementation, I highly recommend making use of their consulting services at the outset. An architectural advisory will set you back a few thousand dollars but will make sure you pick the right architecture plan so that your implementation goes more smoothly. We did a lot of learning as we went, which slowed progress as you might expect.

Another challenging area was the migration of product data from the old site. Although we have a little under 1,000 SKUs, because they represent video surveillance equipment, they each have a lot technical specs along with various other complexities.

We had originally intended to manage product data programmatically via a centralized master data management system, but in the end, this proved too much to try and implement along with everything simply developing and launching the site.

As a result, we did not make proper use of attribute sets for classifying different product types, the results of which we are living with today (one day we will have the product comparison tool set up correctly). On reflection, we would have been better off entering all the product data manually and using the extra time to clean up the organization of our technical specs.

One area where we did make the right decision was not to attempt a complete site redesign at the same time. The relaunch was intended to be a "copy exact" — use the base Magento Enterprise store template and overlay our design on top of it. This worked pretty well, as the base Magento template looked nicer than our old site anyway, and we were able to make some further visual improvements in addition to this.

The good news is that we are now in a place were we can start making some more aggressive site design enhancements, now that the back-end heavy lifting has been completed.

A significant reason to move to Magento is its extensibility and the wide range of extensions that have been developed for it. If you can think of a feature, chances are someone has developed an extension for it. The great thing about this is that it reduces implementation time and cost for new features dramatically. I'm like a kid in a candy store with all the additional ecommerce capabilities that are now available to me.

Lesson learned #2: Not all extensions are created equally. I recommend limiting the number of extension vendors you use so that you can be confident in their quality and reduce the potential for code conflicts. We have mostly used extensions from aheadWorks and Amasty. Not only do they create great products, but the support of both vendors so far has been excellent.

Another reason I like Magento is that, as with Google Analytics and Wordpress, because the basic edition is open source it has a huge install base with lots of people developing for it, figuring things out, writing blogs and tutorials, and answering questions.

Consequently, if you have a question about or an issue with Magento, it's likely that someone has run into it and someone else has come up with a solution. The value of this wealth of information cannot be overstated.

One final downside of the extended development time for this website launch is that Magento Enterprise has moved on to version 1.12 while we are still on version 1.10. I do not intend to underestimate the effort to upgrade to the latest version, but it is something that we will need to tackle in the near future. If you don't, as you move further away from the current version, the cost and effort to upgrade just gets larger and more daunting.

A feature that we intend to take full advantage of over the months ahead is Magento's multi-store capability. At some point in the future I intend to have all of our sites running on the Magento platform which will be a huge efficiency gain for my team in terms of managing multiple websites and stores with a common product set.

One area where we have learned a lot is in regards to SEO. While we did all that we could in terms of onsite SEO, we (by we, I mean I) only redirected about 1500 URLs in our htaccess file. However, we have thousands of old product documentation PDFs which I did not have the time or will to get to before the launch which were still receiving links and traffic.

As I started seeing 404 errors pop up in Google Analytics for those pages and files, I began a multi-week process of updating the htaccess file, so that we now have over 6000 redirected URLs.

I am now keeping our htaccess file updated on a monthly basis by running the URLs being redirected to through Xenu's Link Sleuth, which lets you check an imported list of links (very handy). As redirected URLs break (for example, when products are discontinued and are removed from the site) I'm updating the redirect to keep it working. It's very manual, but worth it in my opinion.

We're now on a two-week release schedule for new features, which is aggressive but achievable. One module that we are replacing as soon as possible is our site search. Magento's default search algorithm is garbage. Incredibly, instead of using AND for an operator it uses OR, which means that the more terms you use to refine your search, the more results you get. It's completely backwards!

There is a truism when it comes to learning Drupal — once you've built your first site, throw it away and use what you've learned to build it again correctly. There were a few times along the way that I thought this about our Magento development process as there is certainly a learning curve and a 'right way' to architect it.

Now that we've launched, I've certainly got no regrets about choosing Magento as an ecommerce platform, and I'm looking forward to everything we can do to expand and enhance it.

The fastest growing eCommerce platform in the recent past, Magento is a PHP based Open Source eCommerce platform. Magento is also the youngest member of the eCommerce platform family; that said the brains behind the product have been around in the industry for quite a while – and that experience quite as well reflects in the product offering.

Magento offers a rather unique combination of a broad set for out-of-box ecommerce features and an intuitive user interface. This comprehensive feature set covers most aspects of an eCommerce solution including product and catalog management, order management, marketing and promotions, customer self-service, user management as well as customer support functions. These features not only allow merchants to deploy simple yet feature rich eCommerce storefront rather quickly, but also provide the backend admin interface with the toolset to allow you to manage your ecommerce operations effectively. This combination is not too common in the product segment that it is most popular in – the small and medium eCommerce platform segment.

Magento is well suited for direct to customer storefronts that offer a limited number of products to its customer like Boutique storefronts, single or Multi-Brand storefronts, Manufacturers and the likes. Magento however is not the best solutions for merchants who offer a large number of products (above several thousands) like large retailers or enterprises that need tight integration of eCommerce with their enterprise systems.

Magento offers three editions as well as a SaaS offering which serve as a cost effective alternative options for customers who are just starting on their eCommerce journey and are not willing to invest in large enterprise solutions.

Do remember that Magento has been dogged by performance issues and is also known for system complexities – the primary source of Magento’s limitations and shortcomings.

Vendor Summary

Magento traces back its root to Varien Inc. – a company originally founded by Roy Rubin in 2001 and later joined by Co-Founder Yoav Kutner. The company worked on osCommerce (an Open Source e-Commerce project) however the team wasn’t too satisfaction with osCommerce as a platform. In 2006 Varien planned a fork from osCommerce but then later dropped the idea and decided to build a completely new e-Commerce platform from scratch. This development work began in January 2007 on what is now known as Magento and the first beta version was release on 31st August, 2007. The product was well accepted and the first stable release on 31st March, 2008. In January 2009 itself Magento was names as an ‘Emerging Player to Watch’ by Forrester in ‘Forester Wave: B2C eCommerce Platforms, Q1 2009’.

Varien was officially renamed at Magento in 2010, around the time when eBay bought a 49% stake in Magneto in March 2010. The minority stake buy out wasn’t officially disclosed until a 100% acquisition by eBay in July 2011. While the official figures are unknown, unconfirmed reports claim that the acquisition was prices at $180M US. This acquisition seems to have been part of eBay’s X.Commerce strategy and Magento is expected to be an important component of it.

While this is defiantly good news for Magento – the eBay support and funding will give Magento an opportunity to fire all its cylinders and accelerate its growth; do keep in mind that eBay has also recently acquired other ecommerce product like GSI Commerce (for $2.4billion) and Intershop (majority stake only of 27%).

Product Summary

Magento is a PHP based Open Source eCommerce platform – licensed under Open Software License (OSL 3.0). Magento eCommerce offering is available in three editions – Magento Community, Magento Professional and Magento Enterprise edition. Of these Magento Community is the freely available open source editions; the other two are commercial open source editions – have an enhanced feature-set, maintenance, supports and come with a price tag. Magneto also offers a hosted SaaS service ‘Magento Go’ that helps customers gets started on their eCommerce journey rather easily.

Magento’s first stable version was released on 31st march 2008 and has been rapidly gaining popularity ever since. In April 2009, Magento launched its commercial open source offering ‘Magento Enterprise Edition’ – this version has a border feather set and complemented with a support services agreement. This was followed by the release of Magento Mobile platform in September 2010 – the platform allowed developers to easily create native storefront applications for mobile devices. These mobile apps tightly integrated with their Magento eCommerce platform.

Keep in mind that Magento is undergoing constant evolutions with new features getting added at a fast pace.

Technology

Architecture

Magento has been built on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) however it also runs on Windows. Magento has been built using the popular Zend framework. One the most important unique selling point (USP) of Magento is its flexibility – Magento adopts OOPs standard, Model View Controller (MVC) architecture and Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) enabling loosely coupling of the various layers and components. Magento also implements Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) data model instead of the traditional RDBMS data model. While these architectural decisions bring in significant flexibility into the system; on the down side they result in an equally complex system that’s a difficult to customize and extend. As a result the platform is also known to be sluggish and requires a heavy hardware footprint.

Architecturally Magento can be considered as a collection of modules – each module is an independent application implementing MVC. MVC implemented in Magento is not the traditions MVC implemented in Java or PHP – it implements configuration based MVC. This means that each module’s is governed by a config.xml – the module will only load the classes / configuration explicitly declared in the file. Unlike the conventional MVC is will not automatically load a class once added in the module codebase.

Magento model implements Object Relational Mapping (ORB) that allows you to manage your database directly from your PHP code – no longer need to write SQL queries. Nevertheless a Magento model also comprises your business logic – something that’s traditionally delegated to the Controller. Magento Models can be classified as traditional Table-Column-Record model and the EAV model that’ spans across multiple table.

Unlike tradition controllers, Action Controllers in Magento MVC do not pass data object to View. Instead, Views are broken up into Templates and Blocks (see Templates section). Blocks are PHP objects that handle data while templates handle the presentation of this data – it is a combination of HTML and presentation related PHP.

Similar to other LAMP/WAMP offering, installation is a pretty straight forward process. Do however ensure that system prerequisites have been met.

Security

Out of box, Magento used its native authentication and authorization system. It allows you to register customer for your storefront as well as user for Magneto’s administration interface. Magento user management allows you to define your own custom Roles – these roles can be granted access to granular level access to individual Magneto resource allowing you to create a strong authorization model for your stores.

Surprisingly though Magento does not support integration with external or enterprise authentication systems like OpenID, LDAP or Active Directory.

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