Adobe Commerce

Magento is a Content Management System (CMS) used for building ecommerce websites. I used Magento when I was part of a team that were building a B2B ecommerce website.

Among the things I love about Magento include:

1. Ability to have multiple user accounts for one store: When I was working on the Ecommerce platform, there was a need to onboard merchants on the platform. The products to be onboarded were quite much and could have been very tedious for one person to onboard all of them. Thanks to the ability to create multiple user accounts for one store while using Magento. This helped to limit the stress.

2. Availability of themes and plugins; Magento makes use of themes and plugins for customisation. This is a beautiful feature as the theme allowed my team to make necessary changes so as to make the website as we desired. The plugin allowed us to add functionalities to the website. Among the functionalities that can be added include invoicing, delivery, etc.

3. Open source and free to use: Magento is an open source software and it is free to use. There are many free themes and plugins one can start using to build ecommerce websites of choice, though some themes and plugins are premium and need to be purchased before they can be used.

There are a few cons I observed about Magento. They include:

1. Hard to learn: It was the first time my team used Magento, and spent sleepless nights trying to understand how it works, and how to customise it. This was very stressful, and was the reason for which my team dumped it.

2. Expensive themes: Magento is not as widely used as some other ecommerce CMSs. This caused there to be fewer theme developers and also making the premium themes to be quite expensive.

3. Small community: Owing to the small user base of Magento, the community is quite small. This made it somewhat hard to get solutions online.

I like how everything I need is easily accessible through the software, I don’t have to integrate a lot of different things to have a fully functional store.

Sometimes some of the setup can be a bit difficult and the pricing could be more competitive.

the ability to display and manipulate graphics is second to none.

We purchased megento 2.0 platform for our ecommerce site. We asked our friends at Magento to recommend some developers. My partners and I are fairly savy HTML programers and quick learners. We picked Magento because it came with a solid template and touted it's back end admin ease of usage. We figured we would hire a developer to make sure we had a correct skeloton and basic map of what we wanted in a site and then take over the work of actually writing and inserting the messaging and digital content. All the developers we were reffered to wanted starting retainers of $30,000 plus for what we knew would only be 10 to 20 hours of work for a developer familiar or specializing in Magento. We ended up finding our own magento developer who we thought understood our concepts and scope of work. Apparently they did but since most affordable Magento developers are based in India be prepared for all types of language issues and conference calls in the middle of the night. I'm sure we got what we paid for so shame on us but the alternative because of magento's lack of credible viable resources was to cancel the project.

Magento is an incredibly powerful tool. I investigated all the biggies in e-commerce when making the decision which one to implement for my store and magento came out on top each time. Everything is customizable and if something isn’t in the settings, there’s literally a module for that or one can hire a dev to build a custom module.
Scalability is not at all an issue in this platform, which means you’re growing pains in the future. There’s nothing worse than putting in $100,000 of development work on a site that is obsolete in a few years.
Unlike other platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce, this option has a more professional look and is a far more robust system. It’s also less likely to be used by scammer sites (Shopify is loaded with fake sites and the company doesn’t do much to stop this fraud.)
The Magento dev community is strong and there is a lot of support online for newbies like me who have questions.

The enterprise version is insanely expensive. Not only do you pay a monthly fee, but the modules themselves cost double to three times more money than their community edition counterparts.
The enterprise version doesn’t give flexibility of hosting providers and support only goes so far until we have to hire private devs for custom work.
With both enterprise and community versions, Unless someone is well-versed in PHP, you’ll be forking out money for developers.