Vm2Mage comes to life
Friday, 04 November 2011
We feel kind of ashamed, but this is how things go: Early 2010 we released a migration-tool called Vm2Mage to migrate VirtueMart data to Magento using XML-RPC. With later versions, bugs were solved, but major improvements were still pending. We are ashamed that it took such a long time, but finally: A new version of Vm2Mage is out - version 0.7. With new pricing.
Bugs and running Magento in shared hosting environments
Most of the critical comments we got on Vm2Mage in the past was that - if you ran into trouble - it was hard to troubleshoot things. When PHP Fatal Errors occurred, it was hard to track them down due to the usage of XML-RPC. When weird characters in the original VirtueMart database were transferred, UTF-8 encoding errors caused the XML-RPC response to fail. And - one of our favorites - some hosting environments caused problems in the Zend Framework library for XML-RPC, which has yet to be resolved by the Zend developers.
Magento is just not fit to be ran on badly configured hosting environments, and setting up a proper Magento site requires a developer with hosting knowledge to be involved - if you do not know how to optimize APC, it's the question whether you can succesfully optimize Magento. However, with offering Vm2Mage, we attracted a different crowd: Non-developers who wanted to run Magento on shared hosting environments. While anybody trying to run Magento in a lousy hosting environment should consider a new job, we have stayed away from making that judgement and simply have released Vm2Mage 0.7 that adds a System Check page and debugging abilities that should help you with solving numerous problems within your hosting environment (if it suffers already from these problems).
Cheap?
We offer two different versions of Vm2Mage: A paid version without support (Vm2Mage Standard, 20 Euro), and a paid version with support (Vm2Mage Professional, 195 Euro). Somehow, most of the people who purchased the cheaper version without support, still assumed that if you pay, you must have right for some support - not having read the actual features of their purchase, and disregarding all disclaimers. It seemed hard for them to realize, that Magento involves deep technical knowledge - and anybody with such knowledge would not have any problems troubleshooting Vm2Mage without our help in the first place.
Because all of these freebie-hungerers, we strongly considered removing the cheaper version altogether, because it attracted a wrong crowd (one that actually should pick up on Magento in the first place). But instead, we have pulled ourselves in yet another experiment: Making Vm2Mage even cheaper.
New version, new pricing
Vm2Mage Standard dropped from 20 Euro to 10 Euro, while Vm2Mage Professional dropped from 195 Euro to 95 Euro. These price droppings are not some sign of desperation - they are just a sign of confidence that Vm2Mage is stable enough to make good money for us, even with lower pricing. Why not free? Simply because our time is worth money. We've already tried giving away Vm2Mage for free, but the thankful crowd that likes free stuff still required support for Magento and blamed us for not giving them the proper support. So the word free and implementing complex software like Magento do not mix well - at least when dealing with people with less technical expertise.