- Original Poster
- #1
It was a pretty big decision, huge, in fact. And it's something that is discussed on these forums almost everyday. Unfortunately, the immediate negatives, uphill struggles and uncertainties more often than not lead to a dead thread, or the OP deciding to plump for a hosted packaged solution of some sort. It think that's a shame - as the benefits really do outweigh the learning curve and potential pitfalls. As I believe is always the way in business, taking the easy route tends to lead you down a path that is crowded with others, all making not as much money as they could!
So here is a breakdown of my experiences, my rationale for the choices I have made, and the effects on our business.
We begin... Stuck with a restrictive hosted cart, looking for alternative hosted carts that offer new functionality
Many of the users on here are in this situation. The business is good, sales build to a point, then level off. The site owner looks at the competition and realise their sites are transforming and adding new features to drive sales - sadly the cart you are on does not have these features, so you want one that does! What starts as a simple exercise looking at a few alternatives soon reveals a basic problem; none of them offer it all, or at least not in a way that matches how your business is designed to operate. We were in this position, so we went for a new hosted cart that offered some fancy stock control and a few other features - almost immediately after joining some of the features we joined for proved not to work very well, and were soon withdrawn altogether! This is a pretty clear cut example of not having control of your own business. We were basically trying to expand our business whilst moulding it around someone else's idea of 'how an online shop should work'. It was never going to work.
In the end we accepted the obvious, and began looking for other solutions. The core business was great, we had just tipped £1m turnover and had a great reputation, but we were stuck at that point.
The difference between hosted cart and self hosted open source cart
Think of an online shop in terms of a bricks and mortar shop. In both instances you can start out with something small and basic, but if business is good then a year later you may want to move somewhere new, and get it refitted to look amazing. You will want to build on what you have and create your 'ideal' shopping experience. Now imagine, in the bricks and mortar world, if you moved to a new bigger, better shop... But you were not allowed to use the type of shelving you wanted. Or fit an electric door. Or a till that worked with a barcode scanner... And in the new shop you couldn't organise your stock as you had in the old store, you had to organise it in a way that wasn't quite what you knew your customers were expecting. You would not be impressed. This, is the effect of a hosted cart solution. It's designed to work a certain way, within a framework you cannot alter or develop yourself. Some are very good of course, and do make possible 90% of what you would ever consider trying, but there will always be compromises. You will always work the way the cart dictates you must, as opposed to the way your business and customers lead you.
An open source cart removes these limitations, in theory. I say in theory, because whilst all open source carts have the potential to be modified in any way you wish, some are very basic out the box and have such small development communities that anything you want changing or setting up is going to be a lot of hassle. Thankfully, there are now several very popular, very established open source carts that have a huge developer base. The biggest have thousands of free extensions, hundreds of chargeable extensions, and so many experienced developers that anything completely custom can be attained at a reasonable cost. In reality, the biggest open source carts have so many extensions, modules, add-ons that it is unlikely you will think of anything that doesn't exist, even if it's functionality needs tweaking a little bit.
Regards cost: Hosted cart solutions of course charge for the duration you use them. Open source is free, but you are likely to spend as much on hosting your site yourself (they won't give you a free server!) as you would pay fees for the hosted solution. Then with open source there are the possible development, extension purchase and problem solving costs to consider. I think these extra costs are justifiable though, as they serve to improve the business, as opposed to paying none stop to simply maintain what you have already.
So we plumped for Magento. Because we're not scared of the big bad wolf...
Mention Magento on here and users, developers and designers of all levels of experience will bombard you with opinions. Often you will hear that it's awkward to use, awkward to develop for and generally more complex than it needs to be. You will also hear that it's complexity and design serves to make it arguably the most powerful and flexible platform in existence. My view is that like most things in life, high levels of functionality require more complex inner workings. MS Paint is easier to understand than Photoshop, but that's only because it is also more restrictive. It's the same deal with most software.
In the end we chose Magento for one simple reason. It has the biggest developer base. The more development, the more extensions. The more extensions, the less barriers exist to creating the perfect online shop. And of course, the more people use it, the better the community becomes at fixing problems. I don't claim that Magento is technically the best platform (it may be, what do I know?), but it's the biggest in terms of use and development - and that gives it a huge advantage.
First impressions. We had seen some amazing sites built on Magento, so were a little underwhelmed with it's out of the box abilities. It's a blank canvas in terms of modern ecommerce functionality. We did notice straight away however, that the way it handles page construction and templates (themes) meant that anything was possible from a design point of view. It really is the cleverest CMS I have ever come across. It's not straight forward at first, but the logic soon shines through. It is possible to make an awesome looking site using Magento.
3 months of setting up...
We spent ages fiddling with it, trying new extensions, fixing bugs and solving incompatibilities between extensions. All to then launch with a site that was immediately down for a week whilst an incompetent person tried to fix it, and broke it some more. Welcome to the world of managing your own site instead of paying a company to use their hosted solution. Also a very big thanks to Edmonds Commerce (member on here) at this point, who stepped in to save the day. In fact thanks to everyone that has offered assistance throughout this project, we have received a lot of support on these boards!
In the end we spent around £3k on extensions, bug fixing and server issues.
The launch of our new site
As it was offline for a week, our position in the serps had been badly damaged. Google had frowned upon us! So you can imagine we were somewhat doubtful the new site would turn our situation round fast enough to make up lost ground. Luckily, we were wrong.
We had previously been receiving a steady 1000 visitors a day, and after a few days of being up the new site was struggling to receive 400. That's pretty scary. But it was shooting up the serps again, and it was on the increase. Now, about 2 weeks after launch, it's receiving about 500 a day. Google seems to love what we have done, and more importantly, so do our customers. Our conversion rate has doubled from 3% to 6%, and the number of customers calling because they can't find the product they want, or they can't figure out part of the checkout process has dropped significantly.
That's a huge thing. We know now that we will soon match and then surpass the positions we formerly held in the serps, and that with the new conversion rate we basically have twice the business we had before. This as you can imagine is an exciting prospect.
The feature set of the new site is not only impressive, it's all tuned to us and our customers. No hosted cart solution could offer us that. In short, it's all been more than worth it.
So here is a breakdown of my experiences, my rationale for the choices I have made, and the effects on our business.
We begin... Stuck with a restrictive hosted cart, looking for alternative hosted carts that offer new functionality
Many of the users on here are in this situation. The business is good, sales build to a point, then level off. The site owner looks at the competition and realise their sites are transforming and adding new features to drive sales - sadly the cart you are on does not have these features, so you want one that does! What starts as a simple exercise looking at a few alternatives soon reveals a basic problem; none of them offer it all, or at least not in a way that matches how your business is designed to operate. We were in this position, so we went for a new hosted cart that offered some fancy stock control and a few other features - almost immediately after joining some of the features we joined for proved not to work very well, and were soon withdrawn altogether! This is a pretty clear cut example of not having control of your own business. We were basically trying to expand our business whilst moulding it around someone else's idea of 'how an online shop should work'. It was never going to work.
In the end we accepted the obvious, and began looking for other solutions. The core business was great, we had just tipped £1m turnover and had a great reputation, but we were stuck at that point.
The difference between hosted cart and self hosted open source cart
Think of an online shop in terms of a bricks and mortar shop. In both instances you can start out with something small and basic, but if business is good then a year later you may want to move somewhere new, and get it refitted to look amazing. You will want to build on what you have and create your 'ideal' shopping experience. Now imagine, in the bricks and mortar world, if you moved to a new bigger, better shop... But you were not allowed to use the type of shelving you wanted. Or fit an electric door. Or a till that worked with a barcode scanner... And in the new shop you couldn't organise your stock as you had in the old store, you had to organise it in a way that wasn't quite what you knew your customers were expecting. You would not be impressed. This, is the effect of a hosted cart solution. It's designed to work a certain way, within a framework you cannot alter or develop yourself. Some are very good of course, and do make possible 90% of what you would ever consider trying, but there will always be compromises. You will always work the way the cart dictates you must, as opposed to the way your business and customers lead you.
An open source cart removes these limitations, in theory. I say in theory, because whilst all open source carts have the potential to be modified in any way you wish, some are very basic out the box and have such small development communities that anything you want changing or setting up is going to be a lot of hassle. Thankfully, there are now several very popular, very established open source carts that have a huge developer base. The biggest have thousands of free extensions, hundreds of chargeable extensions, and so many experienced developers that anything completely custom can be attained at a reasonable cost. In reality, the biggest open source carts have so many extensions, modules, add-ons that it is unlikely you will think of anything that doesn't exist, even if it's functionality needs tweaking a little bit.
Regards cost: Hosted cart solutions of course charge for the duration you use them. Open source is free, but you are likely to spend as much on hosting your site yourself (they won't give you a free server!) as you would pay fees for the hosted solution. Then with open source there are the possible development, extension purchase and problem solving costs to consider. I think these extra costs are justifiable though, as they serve to improve the business, as opposed to paying none stop to simply maintain what you have already.
So we plumped for Magento. Because we're not scared of the big bad wolf...
Mention Magento on here and users, developers and designers of all levels of experience will bombard you with opinions. Often you will hear that it's awkward to use, awkward to develop for and generally more complex than it needs to be. You will also hear that it's complexity and design serves to make it arguably the most powerful and flexible platform in existence. My view is that like most things in life, high levels of functionality require more complex inner workings. MS Paint is easier to understand than Photoshop, but that's only because it is also more restrictive. It's the same deal with most software.
In the end we chose Magento for one simple reason. It has the biggest developer base. The more development, the more extensions. The more extensions, the less barriers exist to creating the perfect online shop. And of course, the more people use it, the better the community becomes at fixing problems. I don't claim that Magento is technically the best platform (it may be, what do I know?), but it's the biggest in terms of use and development - and that gives it a huge advantage.
First impressions. We had seen some amazing sites built on Magento, so were a little underwhelmed with it's out of the box abilities. It's a blank canvas in terms of modern ecommerce functionality. We did notice straight away however, that the way it handles page construction and templates (themes) meant that anything was possible from a design point of view. It really is the cleverest CMS I have ever come across. It's not straight forward at first, but the logic soon shines through. It is possible to make an awesome looking site using Magento.
3 months of setting up...
We spent ages fiddling with it, trying new extensions, fixing bugs and solving incompatibilities between extensions. All to then launch with a site that was immediately down for a week whilst an incompetent person tried to fix it, and broke it some more. Welcome to the world of managing your own site instead of paying a company to use their hosted solution. Also a very big thanks to Edmonds Commerce (member on here) at this point, who stepped in to save the day. In fact thanks to everyone that has offered assistance throughout this project, we have received a lot of support on these boards!
In the end we spent around £3k on extensions, bug fixing and server issues.
The launch of our new site
As it was offline for a week, our position in the serps had been badly damaged. Google had frowned upon us! So you can imagine we were somewhat doubtful the new site would turn our situation round fast enough to make up lost ground. Luckily, we were wrong.
We had previously been receiving a steady 1000 visitors a day, and after a few days of being up the new site was struggling to receive 400. That's pretty scary. But it was shooting up the serps again, and it was on the increase. Now, about 2 weeks after launch, it's receiving about 500 a day. Google seems to love what we have done, and more importantly, so do our customers. Our conversion rate has doubled from 3% to 6%, and the number of customers calling because they can't find the product they want, or they can't figure out part of the checkout process has dropped significantly.
That's a huge thing. We know now that we will soon match and then surpass the positions we formerly held in the serps, and that with the new conversion rate we basically have twice the business we had before. This as you can imagine is an exciting prospect.
The feature set of the new site is not only impressive, it's all tuned to us and our customers. No hosted cart solution could offer us that. In short, it's all been more than worth it.
