Magento is dead – Merchants want a suite of marketing tools, not refactored code

Magento has been poor software since Varien started trying to monetize. It has always been slower than necessary, a huge resource hog, and relatively complex to configure.<p>The real problem is that there is nothing better out there.<p>Magento is the Drupal of the eCommerce world - relatively prominent, but almost universally reviled by developers and not all that easy to use for users. It&#x27;s the worst of many worlds.<p>It&#x27;s too bad, really. Five years ago I was really excited for Magento, but within months I realized that it would almost universally be cheaper (from a development standpoint) to write an eCommerce project from scratch than use Magento - it takes you 95% of the way there in a lot of ways, but that last 5% is critical.

While this article may be correct on a few points, the idea that Magento should bundle every feature under the sun is silly. That is what the module marketplace is meant to provide. And even some of the features tagged as missing ARE provided in the Enterprise Edition if you are inclined to pay for a license.<p>I think the bigger issue with Magento 2.0 is the missed opportunity to use the backward compatibility breakage to clean out some of the horrible bits of home-grown code in Magento and replace them with 3rd party libraries.<p>If anything, I think Magento should actually drop features from core and become a solid platform for others to build upon.<p>EDIT: Speeling :)

I havent looked at it recently, but the code used to be awful, which is perhaps where the rewrite comes in. But giant PHP applications with even more features are not really the future, these things need to be built as sets of APIs and libraries that you can put together to add the features you want (which are complex).

From the developer&#x27;s perspective Magento is a maze of spagetti nightmare.<p>The cost to maintain it, adding custom extensions and keep it up and running as a whole is way, way more than using off the shelf SaaS ecommerce solution.

Every single little thing he mentioned shouldn&#x27;t be in the core product. Magento is not an all in one marketing, shop and aftersale solution; it is an eCommerce platform. Anything above&#x2F;beyond that should be a plugin&#x2F;separate solution.

The developer hostility in this is astounding.

Magento&#x27;s largest problem is that most people who look at it assume it is like Wordpress. Download, click install, change the theme somewhat and get started.<p>Very unlike Wordpress this is hard. So you either shell out cash to outside developers (a healthy enough marketplace exists) or pay the price in learning how to program it yourself.<p>Enough decent materials on how to do this exist but it is definitely not aimed at weekend programmers.

Half of points aren&#x27;t true, for some other there are extensions in Magento Connect...

Refactoring is something that has to be done before adding features. If you first start by adding features, ignoring the fact that the code needs refactoring, the code becomes impossible to maintain. Stopping development of new features during refactoring is also a good pratice. Obviously, the anti-practice is to refactor so often or to spend so much time refactoring that nothing useful is developed.

I have been using Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) for 6months on a production sites in Europe and US, with total revenue so far exceeds a few million dollars. The reason I mention this is to give everybody a context of my comment and background. I work for a large company, so the money doesn&#x27;t go to me.<p>To be fair, some of the features mentioned, for example abandoned cart reports, do exist in Magento EE. While some features like consumer profiling don&#x27;t really belong to an eCommerce platform. Instead, those belong to CRM (consumer relationship management) tools. One of the reasons CRM is an independent system is a lot of shops have offline presence also, and lumping CRM features into eCommerce platform unnecessarily complicates things. There are extensions to sync between Magento and a few CRMs.<p>My wish list for Magento: built-in A&#x2F;B testing, and multiple campaign management.

&gt; A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant&#x27;s needs.<p>Merchants don&#x27;t need security, performance, and a more easily developable system for the developers they hire to build on?

My main problem with Magento was it&#x27;s lack of an API to integrate with 3rd-party systems. Someone implementing a competitor should start with a decent API, and build the interface on top of that. If I had time and money, I would do this myself.<p>Also the EAV database was horrible to deal with.

Apparently spell-check is also a dead technology.

These are features that an e-commerce SASS could build into their service, it obviously creates a huge mess adding such features into the core of a platform. Some of these features could also fit in a plugin but it really sounds like OP needs a SASS.

Anyone have a cache?<p><i>EDIT</i>: here it is. No infringement intended.<p>Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up.<p>So now what?<p>Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 and it is nothing more than a technical rewrite. Magento 2 offers the same feature set as Magento 1. You&#x27;ll just need to pay a developer to migrate all your 1.x extensions to 2.x, since there is no upgrade path.<p>But the community cost of everyone moving to Magento 2.0 ranges in the $USD 1 billion. This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code. A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant&#x27;s needs. Magento is missing a most important suite of marketing and sales automation tools.<p>Here is some features online merchants really dream about:<p>built-in A&#x2F;B testing; integrated social media ROI tracking (e.g. SumAll statistics); sales automation tools: abandoned cart reports, automated follow-up emails, automated payment reminders; consumer behavior profiling to live-target marketing efforts based on behavior; customer persona segmentation such as &quot;single men &#x2F; mothers with children &#x2F; affluent customers&quot;, to increase marketing effectiveness; easy-to-use multi-site and multilingual installations (Magento is cumbersome); helpdesk ticketing system, built-in live chat; built-in onestepcheckout; automated SEO using artificial intelligence; scheduled product imports to update product prices, stock, images attributes - including the ability to create new products and disable out-of-stock products; automatic product categorization based on product description content; social ecommerce (&quot;share this product&quot; with product landing pages for Facebook&#x2F;Twitter); clever discounts such as bundled product discounts: &quot;buy A+B together, get 5% discount on B&quot;; built-in product XML&#x2F;CSV exports for ciao, kelkoo, thefind, google and so forth; built-in newsletter or at the very least built-in Mailchimp support (with automatic setup); None of the above features are going to be implemented in Magento 2.0. What is the incentive to move to Magento 2.0? There is none. Do merchants really need the latest gimmicky &quot;html5&quot; technology? Mercahnts need a suite of sales and marketing tools that help drive their business.<p>So again, like before Magento, there is a huge market potential for ecommerce software that offers the right marketing tools. Magento is dead. But who will bridge the gap? Shopfiy? Wordpress Woocommerce? Drupal Commerce? Each of these new projects is gaining on Magento&#x27;s lead. My prediction is that Magento 1.x adoption has peaked and Magento 2.x adoption will never happen. Instead, The People will switch to far more advanced alternatives. Advanced in terms of marketing that is, not jQuery.