Of course the title of this article was chosen to shock the believers. But I think we are at a point in time comparable to when the only car on the market was a Ford Model-T. You could complain that it sucked, but pretty much the only alternative was a horse and carriage, and you didn’t have to scoop any steaming piles if you went with the automobile.
The way I see it is that the balance of power about who decides what E-commerce software to use has shifted. In the “old” days, a web-construction company would get the job of building a shop. A developer would be given some requirements, and he would suggest software A or B, and marketing would get the finished product and bitch about the poor SEO options available to them. Now with Magento all SEO options are available out-of-the-box, so obviously marketing would prefer Magento…
…and since marketeers are generally better at promoting an idea than developers – the developement team is no longer part of the decision making process. A lot of good marketeers have put Magento out there as the only real option for an e-commerce site and now customers are coming in the door saying “We want Magento”. I’ve never had a customer come in and say “We ABSOLUTELY want OS-Commerce!”
Now I’m not saying Magento is bad – it does absolutely blow the competition out of the water. But there are at least *some* problems at design level that will get many developers and shop-owners alike weeping like little children in a corner, whispering “magento… magento… magento..” incessantly while pulling out the their remaining hair. The only winners will be the Marketeers – but then, they’ve never lost, have they…
Since Nov 2009 I have been working with magento and now I have a single magento install as a multi-site for almost 40 shops and around 25,000 products.
Everything is set on a dedicated server (no cpanel, overcomplicated panels – just pure lamp on centos without even email or DNS; we use godaddy and google for those 2 things).
The server is a quad core with 8Gb of RAM and properly tunned for performance with apc-cache and the only thing we are hosting is a magento install for all those 40 domains (shops).
We haven’t added any plugins/features to magento. It’s basically the out of box thing, with a very simple theme added to it.
We have tried all kind of performance tuning and this the best we achieved.
I must admit if people are just browsing the website, it loads very quickly. But the problem is when we update products and orders. It takes about 2 minutes to save a product and it eats 120% of the CPU and 10% from the memory.
Our products are scrapped from other websites, so we need to do regular product updates and let me just tell you that using the dataflow is the fastest way to import products, but even that takes about 1 hour and 10 minutes to process 500 products. So when we have to do batch updates for 11,000 we have to wait endless hours.
If you’re thinking about using magento for your shop, it’s ok, but make sure to have a dedicated server and don’t even try to have more than 10,000 products or a multi-shop. It just doesn’t work.
MAGENTO is simply NOT scalable in performance.