This is an old review which I did when I was still in trial with Magento Go. Things actually turned out very ugly when I officially paid to sign up with them and experienced their CRAP support.
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I have been trying to start an online shopping store. After looking through a few possible solutions such as wordpress eCommerce / shopping cart themes, opencart, zen cart, oscommerce, and DIY my own, I think I’ll give Magento a Go.
Magento Go is a paid service but you can get a full trial of 30 days completely free. They are also offering $15 / month discount for a whole year from the 1 million stimulus package. If you happen to want to build an online store right now, I have only 2 words for you – Sign up! With the stimulus discount, the entry plan is totally free for the first year.
I had many problems in mind when I was hunting for a perfect ecommerce solution. None of the solutions solved them all until I found Magento. It’s the best eCommerce solution I have come across in these years.
Still familiarizing myself with the whole application which is fairly complicated and would require weeks to master, especially the theme customization / editing part, which I think is yet to achieve good user experience – it’s not easy to build a theme of your own. For now, you can only edit existing themes and customize it wherever you need to.
Unlike wordpress, it’s very easy to build a theme and customize it like a breeze, Magento is known to have a steep learning curve for theme developers. The whole system is heavily designed rather than evolved. It’s a bit pain for the end users / developers to chew in the design.
You’d probably need 2 – 3 times the normal budget to build a decent Magento theme. Other than that, everything else seems fascinating. I’ll catch up with a detailed review later after trying all the functionalities.
