I’ve been hearing an increasing amount of hype about the Magento Shopping Cart product. It’s a free & open source product.
Given the hype, I thought I’d check it out and see if it had substance or was just hot air.
Before I give my comments, let me say I’m generally not a fan of open source shopping carts. I have no problems with open source in general (this blog is WordPress, an open source blogging tool which I love), but all the open source carts I’ve looked at leave a lot to be desired (and I’m not talking about a simplistic functionality check list, I’m talking about tools to help create a profitable business). I’ve also looked at quite a few of the commercial products out there, more than most people.
So is Magento worthy of the hype? In short, yes. This is one awesome looking product. If I were a commercial shopping cart vendor I’d be afraid. Very afraid. This has the freedom and flexibility – not to mention the $0 price tag – of an open source solution, but it also has the polish and sophistication of a commercial solution.
Casting my mind back over what I think some of the better commercial solutions are, I could only think of a few features they have which they either do better than Magento, or Magento doesn’t have yet. However, Magento is still in beta and it’s free! Give it another 12 months, and I think that list of missing features will be very short indeed.
Magento does have a lot of features and flexibility that put most commercial products to shame. The marketing promotions manager – I was drooling on my keyboard at the flexibility! It seems that no matter what tool I use, the marketing managers always dream up some promotion that can’t be done. Well, I challenge them: come up with a promotion that magento can’t do! I’m not saying it’s unlimited, but it’s the best I’ve seen.
Above that, their approach seems very mature. For example, their data interchange features are a very enterprise feeling approach, and the general architecture and structure of the software makes it clear that these guys aren’t amateurs, but making software that is designed to scale up and play with the big boys.
The biggest thing I saw missing (although I have a list as long as my arm of smaller things, and yes Magento team if you are reading, I did read the road map and there’s still a heap of stuff, but you know that I’m sure)Â is a mature newsletter management tool. The two big features I’d like to see are:
- Target newsletters based on customer data – eg “send this newsletter to people who haven’t purchased from us in 6 months or more” or “send this only to people who have purchased products from this category”
- A powerful newsletter creation tool. I find the hardest/most time consuming part of newsletter creation is the thing that you almost invariably want to do: product insertion, it’s always so time consuming and fiddly. There’s a great opportunity to have product “micro templates” and insert products that way.
I could go on for pages dreaming… for example… how about “insert the best selling product in the last month from the category this customer has most commonly purchased from previously” – totally personalized newsletters.
In summary, this is one product to look out for. They are promising an early 2008 1.0 release. It’ll also be interesting to see the community that springs up around it. There will be lots of the normal small webshops, but also think there is an opportunity to attract some of the bigger commercial VARs and sell this into larger organisations. I, for one, will be watching with great interest. Well done Varien!
For those looking for alternative free shopping carts, there’s also Zen Cart, osCommerce, or our list of free shopping carts.
