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Magento is probably the worst coded shopping cart system out there.

Each template takes around 100 hours of work because you have to mess around with with xml files and loads of other stuff.

It was also coded by some Russian coders and not an US company. The US company is just a media company using the system as a marketing tool.

Its also buggy as hell!

Well done smashing magazine for promoting lipstick on a pig.

Um, I don’t agree with Daniel’s assessment. I don’t know who codes it, but I do know that Magento is probably the best open-source cart. It’s really simple to integrate once you get the hang of it.

It’s an easy install as well with SimpleScripts, so don’t listen to either of us. Go take a look!

Prepare a high performance hosting if you plan to use Magento… To be honest, I am really tired of the installation of magento, its error rate is too high.

I know that it is highly recommended by some people from its good architecture, but it is really not easy to approach, at least for this moment!

@BRYAN

Yes, I agree with you here.

I see Magento more as a starting point or a framework for a company that does e-commerce and has professional developers.

It is hard to compare it with something like Joomla or osCommerce. It’s just not click and you’re ready on a $5 dollar hosting. But if you have a group of developers to make a web shop for a big and important customer, Magento is just ideal choice.

Save yourselves the trouble. Find something else. Magento is promising, but lacks in some very basic features — features you’d expect. Sales reports by products, for example. Would you believe you can’t generate a report of how many sales you’ve had for Product X? Believe it. It’s true.

stroke are you on crack?

Its the worst coded! It uses all the bad code practises. Ever hear of UML. Where you can visually design the program before touching the code. you can not do that with magento because it only uses static function calls. this is not true OOP.

I also tried this for a client and it crashed after 30 products.

I know it was russian developers because I spoke with the developers of joomla how tried to make a bridge between the 2. The decided to use my project instead.

Try my project http://www.opencart.com

@Mark – prestashop looks interesting, have you used it?

SERIOUSLY?

How much did the Russian Virgin mafia pay you to post this crap. You lost ALL credibility just now. You just sent every fan of this site to website hell, unsupported, indecipherable, bugged HELL.

Whoever is responsible for this f-ing garbage needs to be sat down ad talked to.

Don’t EVER forget industry standard and your responsibility to new designers.

The devil on my shoulder says “yes! Send them here! The year they spend either giving up or trying to figure this crap out, I’ll be that far ahead”.

Not me though. Been there, done that. Have you guys?!?!?!?!

I think you should take this post down. What kind of post is that? It’s an ad right. Otherwise you’ve got to be kidding because most of the “templates” you posted here were not even worth spending even a minute.

Speaking of Magento, tried it. And whenever I here its name it smells like revolting stench.

If you want to waste your time with something, go watch porn. don’t try Magento.

@John R.

True. People who lack skill will find this a hard software package to use, and will most likely come and post comments like ‘I DO THIS FOR A LIVING’.

I’ve only been reading SM for a few months, but judging from (too) many of the comments posted, readers here are no better than teens throwing obscenities around in a music forum. How on earth can you call yourself professionals acting the way you do, posting the comments that you do. I for one would never hire a designer/developer/etc that acts in that fashion. I sincerely hope you treat your customers differently to how you appear online.

Prestashop is also a good solution, but it’s difficult to find free and good template for that system… maybe here at SmashingMagazine you can do something ??

Either you agree or not, one thing is clear magento has the most visually appealing designs any ecommerce store may have.
But you must have professional and dedicated developer to do it.

Also it is not for people with very low budget as it requires considerable expense on setup, customization and maintenance.

Nevertheless, a very good post.

I have been evaluating quite a few e-commerce solutions these past months and I can only say that Magento outperforms all other I have tested so far.

Those saying it is hard to install… huh? It’s not different from all the others, click, click and you are ready to go. Buggy? Not what I have experienced yet and it runs well on a “standard” hosting solution.

No, I think it is a really good platform. The next platform I’m about to test is Prestashop so we’ll see how those two compares.

/My 2

Having just setup Magento in a breeze and almost finished reading all the doco to get a grip on it so i am confident to tackle making my own themes. I would say its a pretty reasonable system and quite a useful article to see examples of what can be done with it.

Anyone knows how magento compares to Drupal with either http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce or http://drupal.org/project/ubercart?

It takes me 20-30 minutes to make a WP/Joomla template from a photoshop file. In magento that would take days. Its template system is simply disgusting.

I would recommend you to try PrestaShop if you can test things around with your shop :)

Magento is awesome – but most of these templates are unusable – if you’re serious about your online business do yourself a favour and don’t even consider any of those. Every amateur out there got them by now, get yours professionally done.

I’ve been working with Magento since it was beta and it’s a powerful solution. It has a very steep learning curve but once you get it, it’s a piece of cake.

Shame on Smashing Magazine for promoting those template stores – we don’t want those type of sites here.

I disagree with what people wrote; installing Magento is a fairly easy process and pays off quickly. Right now Magento stands out as one of the most professional products in the market and keeps improving.

dkumar!!!! this is the worst SM post……….

SM through out useless authors like this kumar fool!
indian crap!

Magento is a slick E-commerce platform for home businesses etc. However, I would not use it for large businesses that rely on online sales, but then again I’m a biased .NET Developer.

Does anyone know about setting up a marketplace with Magento where people can buy and sell items ?

Thanks.

Jash: You’ve got MagentoConnect from Magento itself, but its really not optimal.

We’re working on building up a really great Magento Journal-site at http://www.magjournal.com with tips and tricks from developers and designers – to developers and designers. This is mainly because we think the blog and “tips” from the Magento isnt that good and also the site is soooo slow.

If someone of you’re interested in contributing let us know!

I use ubercart for drupal. It is not “finished” but when is open-source really finished anyway..Anyway I’m happy with it..it has a big community for support and questions, and the drupal cms is also great to work with.

Wow, why all the hate? Magento looks pretty cool. Stop with the stupid “this is appalling!” bullcrap. If you don’t like the thread topic, DON’T POST.

Heck, you call yourselves professionals. At least ACT professional.

I’d like to see more stuff about Magento.

These designs are definitely sub par compared to the usual high standard of design I like to see on SM.

– Lee

@PG: “Magento may not satisfy everyone’s needs, but it can’t reasonably be called the worst shopping cart ever. I don’t understand why some posters here feel the need to be so agressively against it.”

I honestly don’t think anybody is trolling, lol. It really is a difficult system to work with. I’m not hysterically anti-Magento, but I can fully appreciate how the people who are feel. I don’t rely on other people’s templates to do my work, I’ve got to build them from scratch, so the polarity of people saying “it’s easy!” to people saying “wtf? it’s impossible!” is likely in no small part due to how much customisation people have had to try and work with on it.

Obviously you get the odd genius who’s climbed the mountainous learning curve and has entered a Zen-like relationship with the software, but for the rest of us, we’re never going to get all those hours, days, or weeks of our lives back. Some of us have been reduced to 3am tears trying to get Magento to do unreasonably simple things like a single column layout. I can look back on it and laugh now, but I’ll damned if anybody’s gonna get me to work on it again :D

Not sure how qualified in Web development any of the folks promoting Magento are, or how profitable your company is at selling white labeled versions of this platform to clients. We generate several thousand dollars monthly using CS-Cart, and with its simple PHP/Smarty framework it is a breeze to install, template and configure. Additionally and most importantly we have never had a client complain about back-end (admin) navigation or category and product population. In fact we generally spend less than an hour on the phone, and the client just gets it.

On the other hand, we as a team effort, tried to manipulate Magento just two weeks ago and what a mess. The install size is at least three times larger than CS-Cart, we had to make some pretty exotic changes to our server environment, it took the three of us almost an hour to properly generate a CMS page, and another hour to create a product page. Excuse me, but WTF over? Why does a company charge almost 2 bills for a template – I would too if it took me days to create it!

As noted within several comments, although Magento is an ‘open-source’ framework, it is absolutely the worst implementation of an ecommerce platform for anyone needing to generate revenue by selling it for client use. If your company has a dedicated IT staff willing to spend hours on the phone or on-site to tutor every aspect of implementing Magento, great! In fact this would be a really nice way to force your clients to pay some form of maintenance fee – they will need to call each time changes need to be made to their Web site. However if you want your clients to recommend you/your company to friends (aka word of mouth), switch to any of the other lighter platforms. May cost a couple hundred up-front but at least with CS-Cart, it rewards handsomely with free upgrades and some nice support if ever needed. Hell, I would even use Interspire’s shopping cart product, although costly, much easier to implement and configure than Magento.

Don’t want to believe any of the negative post here? Just check the Magento forums and read all the disparaging and discouraging topics by individuals desperately trying to get this crap to work on their server. Why would anyone create such a difficult product is beyond comprehension unless they had an ulterior motive. Hey, maybe we can sell a Super Enterprise version with support included for say about $9000!

The designs are just templats and may be modified, what Magento is really concered with are the e-commerce aspects and in this sense, Magento is a real success!

You know something is wrong when you unzip it and it’s 60 megs for the app. Great concept, best out there feature wise. If it was faster and lighter it would be great. I think they need to go back and refactor a lot of the code

Most of those themes have absolutely terrible code. A lot of them are from companies that outsource to some pretty flaky coders, foreigners. But then again, they all tend to build off the existing poorly built default themes.

Magento is buggy and uses many poor coding practices, but heck.. few systems I’ve used are any better. Prestashop is crummy. Volution is horrible. Shopify has outrageous fees and a non-customizable checkout design. Xcart and Litecommerce are Russian and they have backdoor access to any account, and LC isn’t 100% open source. I wouldn’t be able to do a justice on how terrible OSCommerce and its offshoots are. Then there are some really complex, really expensive systems that probably aren’t much better. Intershop is supposed to be decent, but I haven’t forked out the dough for a license yet. Cubecart and CS cart are making progress, but design is still a bit too much work (kinda like Magento). Haven’t used Joomla, or a WP implementation, but from what I’ve seen they can be a bit of work to customize with new core enhancements and alternate functionality (something that is fairly decent to do with Magento, after you get past the bottlenecks and limitations it does put forth), so not sure how those CMS based implementations do on larger scale sites (but then M is bloated and has performance issues, and it’s its own system). Magento is slick looking, but beauty is only skin-deep. If you know any decent standards, you’ll see the default themes fall apart in the lack of quality frontend code (Come on, inline javascript? Where did Minu learn to code?), let alone the core, which has too much HTML locked into it. Did I mention it’s too heavily reliant on JavaScript? And no, I’m not talking AJAX… There’s what… three areas of Magento that take advantage of that functionality, yet they laughably claim Magento is the Web 2.0 cart. What a way to run a Fortune 500 website or three!! Weee!

Support for Magento is few and far between, and documentation is the worst. Plus, Roy Rubin has an ego the size of the Hindenburg. He’s definitely got some ecommerce blinders on. Trust me, I met him in person a year ago… he wasn’t any different than he is now. He’s just busier (busy looking for more Fortune 500 companies, not planning improvements that matter most to its user base, of course).

But heck, I’ve been using Magento since day one and was a partner for the past year, while I watched expectations of improvement in support and quality fail to come to fruition (I knew that was going to happen though). It’s interesting to watch it all go down… kinda like the Hindenburg did (a forshadowing of things to come?).

Ah, but I’ve stuck with M because it brings in some high-paying clients… plus I continue to find new flaws and usability issues all the time, and there’s nothing better to aid in the planning and development of a new ecommerce system that whomps them all. Just you wait and see. ;)

Oh, and don’t try to fork Magento. All you’ll end up doing is moving stuff around, like putting the M after the o… stuff that I don’t think Agent K would approve of, though you might be able to trick Agent J into thinking it’s the new hotness. But alas, it’s still old and busted on the inside. Admit it Agent Om… you can’t handle the truth! It’s hopeless… for now. {grin}

FYI, I’ve worked on approximately 18 Magento projects since its release last spring. If that helps you see the bugger… I mean bigger picture. ;)

I installed magento on a shared host no problem.

I have played with it a bit and all seems ok thus far…..(famous last words) I do like the interface of the admin which is appealing to my clients.

Iam not sure what all the fuss is about sounds like designers are pissed cause it isn’t easy and programmers are pissed cause it’s not the way they would have done it…

Other just hate the designs post here (me being one of them …although hellothemes does a decent job…no affiliation)

Please provide a link to your open source feature rich shopping cart…..ahh wait you can’t…”computer says no”

I am by no means a magento fan I have used plenty of carts and few have the features. I will take the difficulty of installation and design if I can offer my clients all of these features newsletters, cms,,,and much much more….

Come on people we hate haters..give constructive feed back so smashing can learn about posting what we want and magento can address their issues…”open source matters”

If you want an easy to customize e-Commerce solution use WordPress Templates + WP e-Commerce. See this smashing article:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/25/35-free-high-quality-e-commerce-templates/

Mangento is very slow shopping cart system. I will never want to use it again! then I change to use opencart which is a lot better than Mangento!! at least I can do anything I want in my shop!

Magento is indeed a very complex ecommerce solution, but i used it only to find some inspiration for developing a custom one. I really dont use any open source frameworks, all of them has the code messed up.

Magento is not that bad but most templates you’ve posted are really a bit boring

Some free Magento templates can be found here link

And commercial ones are reviewed here link

@Fabio – Magento is slow, buggy, template hell and has the worst updgrade system ever.

We already know that, but one million question is, what is the best alternative?
Show me some decent payable e-commerce software? Show me…

@Fabio,

yes I know that, now I’am looking a decent e-commerce and I can’t find it, so I need some help here.
Maybe the best alternative is Interspire.

I think Magento will soon fall down, it just a matter of time. They have great marketing, but even a great promotion can’t save a poor coding ;)

Interesting mixed comments, some love it others hate it. I personally think it could be good, but it’s not easy to integrate your own designs, it’s buggy as hell, and the update process never works. I tried it, but for now I will definitely have to pass. I’ve been looking at Interspires Shopping Cart. Their corporate version is a quarter of the price and it looks to be pretty solid. They’ve been a software developer for over 5 years now. I’m just diving into it now, but I can provide a better review in a few weeks should anyone be interested.

I have a few years experience building e-commerce sites, tried lots and was EXTREMELY disappointed with Magento. I’ve been going back after each update in case they worked out the bugs, but it still sucks. The code was horrible to decipher, the number of files to customize was obscene, and it was so bloated it took 7 minutes to upload one, yes ONE, product. Stay far far away from it.

I was contemplating looking into Magento as we currently do most of our websites using wordpress and this seemed like a logical step for shopping websites. But I must say, now I’m completely confused by everyones responses.

It seems 3 or 4 people slate it, then another 2 say they like it but steep learning curve and these slaters just haven’t bothered to learn the platform enough and then 2 say it’s the best thing since slice bread and another 4 slate it again?

I first heard about it by the wordpress guru Joost de Valk whom I like and respect so If he’s getting stuck in maybe I shouldn’t listen to the haters??? http://yoast.com/guide-to-magento-seo/
I’m a designer so maybe a should hold off for a while, to see if it can develope into a more user friendly solution? I guess I’ll look to download it anyways and probably waste 3-4 days!

After reading this entire thread it’s very obvious that there is a handful of users, posting multiple times as other people, sometimes to promote their own product (e.g. opencart).
[This is obvious from the syntax used, common grammar mistakes, etc, when you take a whole overview of all comments]

Magneto in my experience can be frustrating initially, especially if you’re not a developer, which is probably where most of the posted resentment comes from – but it is easily the most powerful (free) solution out there.

The initial size is large, but so is the Magneto’s functionality – just make sure you use a *good* FTP client that doesn’t take forever between file transfers (e.g. FireFTP sucks for this).
Or use SimpleScripts.

I will say though, that skinning Magneto isn’t fun – it would be fantastic if it were as easy as a WP installation, but it’s not.

We’ve been using Magento for about 6 months and won’t use another shopping cart system.

From a feature standpoint, out of the box and including all of the free extensions out there, it’s head and shoulders above any other system we’ve used (and we’ve used over a dozen)…even on it’s worst day.

We run our own server. You’ll need to optimize your server for it to run quickly. All of ours run super fast. I would not suggest using shared hosting for this system.

The design curve, as mentioned above, IS super steep. There are a trillion files and the directory structure depth is staggering. Once you get the hang of it, it’s about 8 hours of work to theme from a PSD…for us at least. Our designs are graphic heavy though, more simple, primarily css based designs would probably move much more quickly. Here are a few:

em tanner
lisa leonard
fat tie
our own website

Our clients love this system. It does have bugs, but most have pretty simple fixes that can be found through the forum, it’s just a matter of finding them. Like I said, even on it’s worst day, it’s head and shoulders above the rest. We don’t even consider OS, joomla, or Zen viable shopping cart options. Their functionality and code is unintuitive and, frankly, just plain janky.

viva la magento!

PS: david…make sure you’re not putting your template in the core directory. This is overwritten every time you upgrade.

Magento looks great on the surface. BUT …….

I installed it for my business shopping cart and all went well until ….

- FIrst thing I found out was that an upgrade will wipe out all your changes to the default theme and reload back to the DEMO store. For a SIMPLE workaround, you have to copy the default theme and call it something different and customize and use it.

- Tried to update to the latest 1.3.1 – broke everything – could not even get to the admin logon screen. Plus had a hell of a time getting back to the previous version and getting stable

- There common fix is to run a pear script in an SSH shell environment – my host will not left me do that – security risk

- As well as running the PHP command popen() to download and install magento connect modules – had to sweet talk my host into turning that on

- I tried to copy it to my desktop (localhost) – after many days, I finally got it there, many things were broken, as well as too many manual changes to – hidden – files.

- Last but not least, it took almost 4 weeks to answer my forum posts

Started with OSCommerce, then Zen-Cart then Magento ..

Sticking with free, I’m migrating to Prestashop

so good!

thanks

@ET. No offense man, you don’t sound too intelligent yourself. With so many years of php, you can’t figure it out?

Are you 15 years old like the rest of the idiots here?

I just found this slide show presentation on the poor coding of magento.

http://www.priebsch.de/2009/03/had-a-look-at-the-magento-source-code-yet/

its funny. the people who coded it are just cowboys.

wow…this is the most long thread ever for magento themes..

Totally agreed with some as we are one of the pioneering for magento cart system.
in fact, i do agree with many of them who claims magento is hard to code for the front end.
there was once instant where we have fix a bug throughout the 15,000 files…dig all the way in for a week. but its great experience.
now i think Magento is far the best of the best, on top of all other carts with its features available!

see some sites we did recently, its all good. no drama.

http://www.naturenu.sg
http://www.candleflo.com
http://www.boutiquenextdoor.com.au
http://www.iwantiwantiwant.com.au

Magento is the best e-commerce Open Source Plateform.

Some people seem to be frustrated about code and design architecture because Magento is built on top of Zend Framework. If you familiar with procedural coding, i understand why some people « hate » Magento simply because they don’t know about MVC (Model , View and Controller) approach.

Magento is built on very strong and flexible structure. Take a look at Zend Framework to learn about it.

http://www.framework.zend.com

I’ve worked with 3 top opensource carts, osCommerce, Zen cart, and Magento. Although I’m still new to Magento, but I really think the developer should really need to path way to much better coding and system. This script is way slow than the two carts. Also upgrade is nothing but the pain in the ass. But the good things, it has excellent design/graphics, and more complete in-built features.

I still prefer Zen cart for few reasons:
- Much better coding, easy to understand, easy to modify, flexible.
- modules are easy to port to higher version.
- Upgrade is easy, even non technical user can upgrade it.
- Stable, running fast, but a little issue in database queries, lot of queries though
- I’ve tested on a client stores with 6000-20000 products and keep adding, with thousand of customers, very big shops, and ZERO bug so far. I mean it.
- Public Forum support is enormous! You can get response within minutes, no kidding.

But he weakness of Zencart
- New release tend to be late recently
- Poor default design/graphic, it is like having a car with GTR engine on Mini’s body. most likely new user will have to buy a template.
- Developer a bit kind of conventional, not like varien which is so aggressive to make market and dare to put new inventions.

I predict, in the future, Zen-Cart and Magento will stays at the top, it is depend on the developer of each script to overcome their weakness, and to make our life easier.

As web designer and developer I like Magento. After reading the fine manual for designers (do you remember? RTFM?) I have no problems with translating my psd files in to Magento skins, templates or interfaces. Just my 2 cents :).

WOW! I was looking around for a more robust cart solution (i like wordpress but i know its limitations) and magento (i call it magneto too!) came up. And it LOOKS great and backend is nice but didn’t really crack open the hood yet. I am a wordpress guy learning drupal (UGGGGH but i am starting to like it) so learning ANOTHER platform would not be a stretch. either way, great post/comments thread. Brought up good points as well cautions.

Wow … this templates are very wunderful.

Hi all,
i respect everyone’s comment here. But we must understand one thing like magento is not a simple application. have lot of features and people love this because of its pretty features and clean style. We love our products than others, its natural.

I am making a store for PLR products. I found some good and useful resources in online about magento and created the cart. tested, its fine.

I have gone through http://www.opencart.com demo also, its nice and simple. I have to check it up with an installation. Thanks to Daniel Kerr.

Coming to templates shown here, the post was made in may 2009, later many theme developers introduced new themes.

SM need to update this post. This post may give an idea to the beginners to choose where the themes available and some more useful information like your recommendations.

I welcome this post and i am happy to see you all.

Hi,

I have completed the website http://www.theplrmart.com .Please have a look and suggest me the best magento theme to suit for this website. Currently using hellotheme, but there is no after sales support.

SM can you please start a post on magento digital downloads themes that suit best

Regards
Venkat

Why would you not just build a shopping cart yourself? e-comm is fairly straight forward, just build in the usability you like and improve when you have time.

Another interesting e-commerce solution is Prestashop.