Posts Tagged ‘proprietary’
Magento Comparison with Proprietary E-Commerce Solutions
Friday, July 31st, 2009
I recently came across an answer on a LinkedIn question, and I wanted to share it with you all. Roy Rubin, CEO of Varien, the company that designed and built Magento, the open-source e-commerce platform that has totally reinvented the e-commerce landscape.
The question was asked, “What are the pros and cons of Magento compared to middle and high end e-commerce proprietary solutions?”
Roy responds with a numbered list of reasons in support of Magento, and I really appreciated them. In his fifth bullet point, he specifically heads off the false idea that Magento doesn’t work for mega-sized e-commerce deployments.
Here’s how Roy Rubin responds:
”
Thanks for raising the topic. Despite my bias (clearly), a few clarifications to address here:
1) CMS – Our next enterprise release will feature a significant enhancement to our content feature set. CMS+ will allow for the creation of multiple pages, restricting publishing privileges for authorized users only and support versioning. We will also introduce Widgets (configurable page blocks) for insertion to CMS pages.
2) Customization – Our experience in working with retailers using Magento over the past 18 months has shown that less customization work is needed in most scenarios. The more unique the business model off course, the more custom code that needs to be developed. The architecture supports such enhancements without jeopardizing upgrades. This is given due the products’ rich feature set.
3) Templating – It does indeed take longer to template Magento initially (comparing to other open source solutions not proprietary). Magento’s architecture is such that it allows for template hierarchies, reuse and all this without effecting upgrades. It is to the retailers benefit/advantage.
4) Integration – I would argue that integration is rather easy. Certainly easier than 3rd party proprietary systems that are closed by design. Our web services based API certainly helps as well.
5) Target Market – Magento today is consumed by all size retailers, including Fortune 500’s, leading market brands, and billion dollar online companies. It’s important to note that on the upper end, we have retailers doing tens of thousands of orders a day.
Hope this helps and I look forward to reading additional feedback.
”
I’ve heard a lot of people complain about how complicated Magento is, but it’s usually people that are wanting a do-it-yourself solution like many of the other lesser e-commerce solutions. Of course, once you get Magento set up, it’s one of the most user-friendly, manageable systems available for any size sales site.
The simple truth is that Magento boasts a built-in robust feature set that reflects thousands of hours of development from some of the best guys in the business, and already in the first 18 months on the market, members of the development community have contributed hundreds of extensions, evidence that they too have recognized Magento for what it is: The herald of the next generation of e-commerce (aka, the coolest thing since broadband). Oh, and did we mention that it’s free?
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Tags: comparison, Magento, proprietary, roy rubin, varien
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