Magento 2 Nightmare? My 5 Reasons to Avoid It

Magento may seem like the ultimate e commerce platform, but behind its enterprise level features lurks the potential for many merchants to architect a nightmare. While a Magento build could be the best thing that can happen to your business, it could also be the worst. Hi, I'm Mark Schust, a teacher for my own company, McAdemy, where I train developers on Magento full time. Although Magento is my livelihood and I definitely consider myself sort of a Magento maximalist to some extent, it's not always the right choice for your business. Magento is the leading open source ecommerce platform platform on the market. It has a dynamic feature set and an extreme amount of customizability and it's the top choice of many top merchants in the world. But that doesn't mean that it should always be your top choice. In fact, there are some reasons that will make you think twice before choosing it that not many Adobe partners are allowed to talk about. In this video, I'll cover my five big reasons why you may want to avoid Magento and tips to analyze your situation to help determine which platform is best for you. When you compare it to all of the other e commerce platforms out there, Magento is definitely on the more expensive, expensive end when it comes to licensing, hosting and development costs. If you are on the enterprise offering of Magento, which is Adobe Commerce, then licensing alone typically starts around $15,000 a year and then goes upwards depending on your needs. In regards to hosting, you definitely don't want to be managing a web server all by yourself, so I always recommend a more managed hosting solution. You can't just host it on any old web server though. Magento is extremely resource intensive and and uses a lot of memory, so when your traffic grows, so does your server costs. Hosting costs have actually come down over the years, but expect to spend around four or five hundred dollars a month for a decent managed hosting provider who can also diagnose those issues related specifically to Magento. You'll also need an expert development agency that specializes in Magento development to build your site and make customizations to your store. While it may be possible to find a web development agency that works with multiple e commerce platforms, the depth of the Magento architecture require an extremely deep knowledge of the intricacies of the framework. You can't just go hire someone's friend or your next door neighbor that dabbles in computing to build your Magento storefront. It's just too complex. A decent budget for a very basic Magento build costs around $50,000 in the US with ongoing retainer agreements being around the $10,000 mark a month. With costs like these, Magento only usually makes sense for companies that rely on E Commerce to fulfill and carry out their core business needs, and they typ between 1 and $5 million a year at a minimum. While you can run Magento on a lower budget than the figures that I just mentioned, it isn't too common, and it's probably a red flag that Magento just isn't right for you if those figures seem astronomical and Magento may just be overkill for you or your business when you can get similar features and functionalities for your small business on platforms like Shopify or BigCommerce. One of Magento's main strengths and features is its ability to be 100% customized. Hosting platforms such as such as Shopify control the management of specific features, which means that the ability to completely customize your store is beyond your control. For example, if you wanted to customize an area of the checkout on Shopify, sorry, you won't be able to, but you can completely customize your Magento, build to your heart's content, and do anything you want. That's the power of owning your own code on your own infrastructure. But not all businesses require that level of customization. I personally believe that most small businesses customize their stores way too much. They think they need a high level of custom customization and flexibility, when at the core all they really need is the ability to create and manage simple products and take in orders. And if you do have some specific business needs that feel like they'd be very hard to accomplish on a hosted storefront like Shopify, it may be a small sign that Magento is right for you. It's easy to get carried away building out customized features and functionality for your store, like really customizing your theme, adding in a bunch of modules and extensions, and so on. But most of these enhancements may not be core to your business of just selling stuff online. Many of these customizations lead to bloated sites with performance and maintenance issues, and you can far often make a simpler customization on other platforms that may not have those bottlenecks. After coding in Magento for over a decade now, I can personally tell you that coding in Magento isn't for the faint of heart. If your business does require specific customizations to achieve the desired effect of your brand, that isn't typically a process that you would carry in house. Unless you have extremely dedicated Magento expertise on staff, this means that you will need to find external expertise and this will almost always be in the form of a Magento agency partner. Very knowledgeable Magento developers are extremely hard to find. If you think you can hire two or three Magento developers and just bring them to work at your company on site, you're probably mistaken. Unless you've been through this process before. The complexity of the platform means that building a highly functional store to your specific project specs takes extensive development and project management experience. Without access to some sort of Magento specialist, your business risks choosing and installing the wrong extensions, implementing half baked customized solutions or deployments that are unstable or filled with bugs and critical flaws. This always results in higher costs, missed deadlines, and plenty of headaches. Most smaller companies may be better served by finding platforms with easier to find skills and talent. And if you agree with me, be sure to tap that like button to support my channel Building, launching and managing a Magento store is not a quick process. You'd be surprised at how many times I started on a Magento project and the merchant thought they could launch in just a few weeks time. If you are at all under any sort of time pressure or don't have time allocated to focus your attention on your E Commerce build, definitely don't choose Magento. You need to budget substantial time into your Magento build for certain activities. This includes data imports and product management which I typically always recommend. Starting first before any other item in your build. Hang ups with data can set your entire build back weeks or months. Designing and developing your custom theme, which typically takes eight to 10 weeks at a minimum to build a custom theme the right way. Creating content, images and other store assets, which can take significant time, especially if you have an SEO initiative or more advanced content strategy and Magento store configuration, which includes determining how taxes in your store will work, which payment gateway to use, and shipping methods that you'll want to offer. Many businesses totally underestimate the amount of effort that's required to build a storefront and specifics in Magento that may take slightly longer to implement than other platforms due to the amount of extensibility in the framework, they assume their Magento store will be up and running in a matter of weeks or months, when in reality you'll probably want to budget between 4 months and 12 months for proper planning and execution depending on the needs of your project. In some industries such as fashion and manufacturing, Magento has become the default platform of choice for E commerce. But choosing Magento just because it's a familiar option to those in your industry or because it's the popular choice can backfire. Before making a decision, I recommend that you thoroughly analyze popular Magento alternatives such as Shopify Shopware and BigCommerce. You don't want to just compare the tech capabilities and features of each platform, you want to evaluate how well each platform aligns with your specific business needs including size, budget, team capabilities and requirements. Magento offers an amazing amount of customizability, flexibility and scalability, but that doesn't matter if a 40 or $100 a month Shopify plan may fit your project needs. Lastly, I've heard from many developers who really aren't familiar with the e commerce landscape recently mentioned that Magent Dead. Yep, completely and utterly dead. If you've heard this and are wondering if it is really dead, check out this next video as it'll help dispel some myths surrounding these rumors. Thanks so much for watching. If you like this video, remember to tap that like button and subscribe to my channel for more videos all about Magento. And until next time, keep coding.