0 - Magento in 3 months

0 - Magento in 3 months

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Discussion

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Thursday 23rd October 2014
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ehasler said:
Magento does let you do this, but there is no reason Google would penalise it unless you used the same content on each site.

I've noticed a few visits to my site from this thread, so just for anyone who's interested - the Magento site I started this thread about no longer exists, but the site in my profile is custom written by myself, with Wordpress running everything under /blog.
So just to be clear, the Magento site should be the landing page (main URL), with wordpress like an "add on" for the blog stuff. Not the other way round.

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Thursday 23rd October 2014
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Also ehasler, with your pet website. I really like the drop down box thing on the home page. Is this a standard add on function.

I have an issue with some products where we have hundreds of choices (built/assembled to order items), and showing them all on the site looks messy. Could this function also have images that change each time you select through the choices?

ehasler

Original Poster:

8,566 posts

282 months

Thursday 23rd October 2014
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That does seem to be the most common configuration, bu you can have it configured how you want - for example Wordpress running under "/" and Magento running under "/shop"

There are also various plugins to further integrate the two apps, but I don't have any experience of these. It's worth taking a look at the Magento website, and seeing what's available and how it's used.

BGARK said:
Also ehasler, with your pet website. I really like the drop down box thing on the home page. Is this a standard add on function.

I have an issue with some products where we have hundreds of choices (built/assembled to order items), and showing them all on the site looks messy. Could this function also have images that change each time you select through the choices?
The pet food drop down box thing on the top left of the home page is a mixture of JavaScript, PHP and MySQL. I wrote it myself, but there are loads of similar examples online.

As standard, Magento does have the functionality to select different configurations for products (e.g., a T-shirt with different sizes and colours), but the images don't update when you select different options. It's been a year or so since I last used Magento, so I don't know if there are any plugins that make this happen.

One thing I found with Magento is that it is very powerful, however if you want something that isn't available as standard or from a 3rd-party plugin, it isn't particularly easy to get things modified.

Edited by ehasler on Thursday 23 October 13:33

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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I have been doing a bit of research, I cannot seem to find what the benefit of Magento really is unless you are doing 100's transactions each day and have a developer constantly on tap or in-house.

Shopify for ~ £30/month does exactly the same. Why pay £1000's?

I would have liked back-end functionality, connection to accounts, ERP and so on, but this would cost £10,000's

Am I missing something here, I have done the maths and cannot see where a ROI would ever come from.

Is it only developers that ever recommend Manento?


jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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No, I'm a developer and I wouldn't recommend Magento for most smaller SMEs. You're right - you need to be wanting some pretty heavy lifting or customisation to warrant Magento over some options like Wordpress + Woocommerce.

If you're contemplating Shopify vs Magento then you've misunderstood the market Magento is aiming for. Rightly or wrongly Magento seems to have gained this catch-all, fits every situation reputation.

The self hosted alternatives to Shopify would be Wordpress + Woocommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop. These are the simpler options, stick them on a shared hosting server with a few hundred products and run 4 or 5 figures of revenue through them a month.

With ROI you want to be looking at the figures over 2 or 3 years. If you're only using Shopify at the $30/month level then you're probably not going to be running a full on 24/7 business - I imagine it'll be something you're doing on the side. So the fair comparison would be to look at creating your own Wordpress/Woocommerce site, sticking a theme on it and maybe paying a developer 2-3 days to finish some bits off. In which case you could have a self hosted site up and running for less than £1000, including hosting for a year. That would do you for 1-2 years, during which time you'll have spent $720 on Shopify.

If you're running a full on 24/7 business then you'll probably be spending $80/month on Shopify - so your 2 year cost is now $1920.

Also, an accountant might want to correct me on this, but with developing your own site you can write that off against your tax. Where as I think Shopify would just be a monthly subscription fee which can't be written off.

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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jammy_basturd said:
No, I'm a developer and I wouldn't recommend Magento for most smaller SMEs. You're right - you need to be wanting some pretty heavy lifting or customisation to warrant Magento over some options like Wordpress + Woocommerce.

If you're contemplating Shopify vs Magento then you've misunderstood the market Magento is aiming for. Rightly or wrongly Magento seems to have gained this catch-all, fits every situation reputation.

The self hosted alternatives to Shopify would be Wordpress + Woocommerce, OpenCart, PrestaShop. These are the simpler options, stick them on a shared hosting server with a few hundred products and run 4 or 5 figures of revenue through them a month.

With ROI you want to be looking at the figures over 2 or 3 years. If you're only using Shopify at the $30/month level then you're probably not going to be running a full on 24/7 business - I imagine it'll be something you're doing on the side. So the fair comparison would be to look at creating your own Wordpress/Woocommerce site, sticking a theme on it and maybe paying a developer 2-3 days to finish some bits off. In which case you could have a self hosted site up and running for less than £1000, including hosting for a year. That would do you for 1-2 years, during which time you'll have spent $720 on Shopify.

If you're running a full on 24/7 business then you'll probably be spending $80/month on Shopify - so your 2 year cost is now $1920.

Also, an accountant might want to correct me on this, but with developing your own site you can write that off against your tax. Where as I think Shopify would just be a monthly subscription fee which can't be written off.
Very interesting JB, thank you. Dont get me wrong I am not trying to do this on the cheap but it seems like scalability is key. I like the ease of Shopify and have built a couple of test sites, easy for anyone of us to tweak. Plus I need to run something selling completely different products, adding all onto one site seems to cause confusion (ie jack of all trades). Wordpress also connects to shopify.

What I ideally wanted more than simply a website was B2B functionality that can talk to my key trade accounts. Help with credit control etc. I seem unable to find anything that can do this?


jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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BGARK said:
Very interesting JB, thank you. Dont get me wrong I am not trying to do this on the cheap but it seems like scalability is key. I like the ease of Shopify and have built a couple of test sites, easy for anyone of us to tweak. Plus I need to run something selling completely different products, adding all onto one site seems to cause confusion (ie jack of all trades). Wordpress also connects to shopify.

What I ideally wanted more than simply a website was B2B functionality that can talk to my key trade accounts. Help with credit control etc. I seem unable to find anything that can do this?
Your best option will depend on your long term goals for the website/business. If you eventually want to be turning over six or seven figures you'll eventually want to have full control over your website - so you might as well start off on a path that allows for that.

For trade accounts, it will really depend on whether those companies have opened up APIs to be able to talk to their systems. Otherwise you need to hope that they've got an easy way of downloading data in a CSV format or similar to then upload to your website (messy).

What sort of credit control options do you need?

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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jammy_basturd said:
What sort of credit control options do you need?
Ideally the ability for our customers to log in, see their account history, terms, credit balance left, to put people on stop and send reminders automatically, this alone is a huge admin task for us.

90% of our customers buy on credit accounts 30-90 days (very specialised products) and we t/o more than 7 figures.

In addition we don't really advertise or market ourselves at all, most of our business is word of mouth, hence why if I can suss this all out we could expand our business substantially, especially for export.

jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Tuesday 4th November 2014
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Account history is included with both Magento and Woocommerce by default.

Terms and credit balance, etc are more custom options. Just had a quick search for Woocommerce and there doesn't seem to be any that exactly fits the bill. Wouldn't be too hard to create a custom module to provide that functionality though.

cuneus

5,963 posts

241 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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Surely your customers want to be able to use Purchase orders as well ?

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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cuneus said:
Surely your customers want to be able to use Purchase orders as well ?
Of course?

MonkeyBusiness

3,912 posts

186 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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@jammy - how much have Wordpress ecommerce plugins come on over the past couple of years? I've seen some stunning examples of the plugs you mention (I'd also include Ecwid in there) without diving into the back end.

My concern with Wordpress is it wasn't built to be a shopping cart. Its a very good blog application.

I'll admit I started with Magento a few years ago when I wasn't putting that many transactions through and it isn't the big beast that everyone fears.

I'm genuinely interested in the WP plugins for a pilot project I might start.

jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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Magento is a funny one. If you just take it as it is out of the box, maybe stick a few extensions on it then you can get it to run on shared hosting OK.

However, I did a project recently where the product catalog had ~7,000 products across 65,000 SKUs. We went up to a fairly meaty server and just couldn't get the caches to rebuild in a sensible time. There were also major headaches with imports. We started looking at switching to AWS to separate the web server from the DB and CDN, etc. Unfortunately the client ran out of money so the project is on hold. The problem is seems with Magento is that the moment you start encroaching into scaling and customisation you're into the lower end of the enterprise market for developers and servers - which isn't cheap.

Wordpress however has come on leaps and bounds. I believe Woocommerce is now the biggest self hosted ecommerce option - certainly the fastest growing. It doesn't have all the features of Magento out of the box, but then that makes it much simpler to manage and setup. It also means you can install only the plugins you need to setup your website how you want it.

The quality of the plugins is usually quite good. On Magento there are a lot of devs creating plugins (due to the high demand) that just don't understand the Zend Framework it is built with, which results in poor quality and buggy plugins. With Wordpress, it is much more vanilla PHP so a lot more coders are more proficient at it. There's still a lot of buggy crap out there but with the community being so big it's usually easy to find reviews to see what is good and what is bad.

Wordpress has come a long way in the last few years and is definitely not just a blogging platform any more. It's perfect for most uses that SMEs will chuck at it, though the more you move towards the "ME" part of SME, the more you venture into Magento territory.

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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jammy_basturd said:
Unfortunately the client ran out of money so the project is on hold.
And here is one of the biggest issues, it always becomes the clients fault and the developer starts rubbing their hands together even though the project may only be half completed. If they had known they had to pay much more at the outset would they have signed up in the first place, possibly not?


jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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Actually the website is/was complete. The client failed to set aside any money for marketing. The client is an old friend of mine, so I helped more than what was paid for.

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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jammy_basturd said:
Actually the website is/was complete. The client failed to set aside any money for marketing. The client is an old friend of mine, so I helped more than what was paid for.
Is he seeing any ROI as yet?

jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Wednesday 5th November 2014
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No, without any marketing there is no traffic to the site. He's had one order that he had to refund as the manufacturer had stopped making the product. I think he plans to pick up the project sometime next year but for now he's concentrating on another venture he started in the middle of this year.

BGARK

5,493 posts

245 months