First E-Commerce Site Using Magento

Up until now I’ve built all E-Commerce sites using WordPress themes designed for E-Commerce. The reason being that the owners simply wanted an an online store option for their customers to complement their physical store. It’s not that they weren’t serious about E-Commerce but it’s the of level E-Commerce adequate for their needs.

The T&T e-commerce landscape is at such an infancy that there are few who’ll really invest in a full scale online store. That’s for a number of reasons: the lack of e-commerce infrastructure, limited investment funds for start-up, inventory, lack of online marketing skills and other requisites.

Now that one of my major headaches is over, the payment processing one,(see Finally An Online Payment Solution For All Of Trinidad & Tobago) I’m happy to say that I am developing such a full-fledged site which will truly make a mark on the local online scene as there’ll be no other like it in the country. For this site I’ll be using MAGENTO as the E-commerce platform and I’ll explain why.

WordPress vs Magento

WordPress is a blogging platform first with the emphasis on content creation with the E-Commerce functionality plugged in. Magento on the other hand is an E-Commerce platform first and for them, blogging was the plug-in. Since it goes without saying, I won’t say it!

Who uses Magento

Magento is used by many popular sites you already know like Office Max, Olympus, The North Face, Vizio to name a few. Suffice it to say, if it’s good enough for them, ‘who’s we?’

Forward Multimedia’s first Magento website

I’m using Magento after opening discussions with my client ruled WordPress out of the equation by virtue of their base 1000+ product catalog. That’s beyond serious, that’s hardcore. I suggested Big Commerce hosted shopping cart but the monthly fee for 1,000 plus initial products seemed too high for an unproven local e-commerce market and my client wanted to start cautiously. So I recommended Magento as it’s free and open source, with the option to upgrade to their paid versions if need be.

Will I be recommending Magento over WordPress now?

It really depends on your scale. If you’re really serious about E-Commerce and building a solid online store then I’ll definitely recommend it over WordPress. Magento templates cost more than double and the back-end administration to set up is more complicated, would take more of my time and of course cost you more. But if you’re shelling out $3K for the payment gateway then ‘chinksing’ on the website wouldn’t make sense would it?

I’ll be setting up a dedicated Magento page soon featuring its Trini application but for the time being if you want to learn more, Google is your friend .