Magento expensive?
Wednesday, 23 December 2009When comparing Magento with other open-source webshops, it is often said that Magento is more expensive. But is that true? Let's take a look at all the aspects.
Implementation time vs. functionality?
Installing Magento, osCommerce, ZenCart or VirtueMart is straight forward. But if you're not used to setting up Magento, you will discover it is a lot more complex than for instance Joomla! and your hosting environment has to meet much more minimum requirements - a lot of times the hosting environment just does not meet up to the standards.
But installing the application is just part of the implementation. Configuring things takes up more time. It involves the setup of product-categories and products. But as Magento has many many options, it takes more time to think about how to configure them. You also really need to familiarize yourself with the documentation to know what is what.
This scares off a lot of people. But what you have to realize is that because the Magento application offers so many options, it takes more time to setup the base - but if you need to extend it you will not find problems with that. You're never stuck with poorly written existing plugins or left with no alternative then hacking the core. Hacking the core sounds reasonable for the near future, but maintaining these hacks will eventually push up costs sky-high.
Theming?
When it comes to this complexity of Magento, people often refer to the theming part. Because Magento themes are far too complex, people say its more expensive. This is not true. It really depends what you want to do with your theme. If your Joomla! template looks great with the default Magento theme, you don't have to spend any extra money on it.
If you think you need to change some colors and images, you can adept the parent/child mechanism, which allows you to only copy those files from the default theme that you want to modify, leaving the rest intact. Because only few parts of the original theme are modified, it's very easy to maintain changes when upgrades come available. This way Magento becomes much cheaper in maintenance costs than other shops.
Next, if you do not only want to modify the CSS and/or images, but also the PHP-logic, the nightmare with other shops begins. Internal PHP-logic and HTML-code are combined into one big mess, that is hard to modify and worse to maintain. Magento however offers a clean interface, separating the internal logic from the output logic. True, it takes you a bit longer to get used, but in the end it's far more flexible and cleaner to maintain. The more changes you need to make to a theme, the better the choice for Magento would be.
Extensions
Usually you end up spending money not only on the implementation and theming of the shop, but also on the purchase of additional extensions. For most e-commerce applications (VirtueMart, Magento, osCommerce), there is a wealth of third party extensions. Some of them are free (usually open source) and some of them are commercial.
The more commercial extensions you need, the higher the costs of the total implementation will be. Take for example the payment gateway iDEAL (which is used for online payments with banks in The Netherlands). There is an iDEAL-implementation shipped by default with Magento, but with VirtueMart you could pay 125 Euros for an iDEAL-extension. So, for Dutch customers Magento could be cheaper than VirtueMart.
Other payment gateways are free for both applications. Again others are commercially available for Magento, but free for VirtueMart. The same counts for extensions with other functionality. The major point here is that it really depends on which functionality you need.
Conclusion
So is Magento more expensive than other shops like VirtueMart or osCommerce? Well, it really depends on the choices you make. In general, the implementation of Magento (installation, configuring, theming) will take up more time/money than VirtueMart. But when your shop starts to grow, you will probably want to add more features to the site. Our recommendation is: If you have a low budget, VirtueMart or osCommerce are fine choices. But if you want a longer term investment, Magento is the right tool.