Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by debacle 4530 days ago
Magento has been poor software since Varien started trying to monetize. It has always been slower than necessary, a huge resource hog, and relatively complex to configure.

The real problem is that there is nothing better out there.

Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds.

It's too bad, really. Five years ago I was really excited for Magento, but within months I realized that it would almost universally be cheaper (from a development standpoint) to write an eCommerce project from scratch than use Magento - it takes you 95% of the way there in a lot of ways, but that last 5% is critical.

1 comments

>>>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It's the worst of many worlds.

This a thousand times.

I've used both and as a developer it was incredibly painful to customize either for any specific feature or function. The first time I upgraded Magento, it completely broke the client's site. A nice Sunday afternoon was spent hacking together plugins to fix what the update broke.

Both are horrible to work with and I shudder anytime someone suggests it to me for their ecommerce platform. You'd be better just hiring a .Net developer and have them build you something from scratch.

Let me know how bespoke commerce apps work out for you financially.