I’m setting up an E-Commerce website for our 30 years old retail company located in Dubai/UAE, The website will host 3000+ products.
After searching for almost one month the best solution I found that will meet most of our system requirements is Magento Enterprise. The problem is that the cost associated with getting that software is very high and I didn’t understand what we will get for the $11,000+ that we have to pay (Is it only the license or they will provide a full package from Design to Developing?).
My questions are:
1-Is it possible to hire a developer to program a Magento-like E-Commerce site with the same functionality available in Enterprise? or we better play it safe and pay the 11K annual fee?
2-If that is possible what should we take under consideration when doing that?
3-What would be the cost of programing an enterprise like website from scratch.
4-Is there any other E-Commerce software that we are not aware of that will compete with Magento (Quality/Specifications)?
I appreciate any reply I will get for this questions.
What features did you need from the Enterprise edition that weren’t included in the Magento Community edition? (The free version of Magento)
To answer you other questions:
Yes, you can always hire a developer to create something similar to Magento’s features.
Some considerations would be development time, what kind of support you would receive from the developer, knowing that the custom software follows PCI compliances, and the quality of the developer.
It really does vary. You certainly have to pinpoint your budget and just shop around.
I really haven’t try too many carts scripts, so I can’t really provide much of a recommendation
I would suggest talking to the Sales team at Magento to see all the options are available to you. They may be able to assist to see whether or not the community edition is suitable for you.
We just finished with a Magento Enterprise build that took about 3 months and I would say now… RUN! Magento is a nightmare to work with. Even with the enterprise license, their support is rediculous. Support tickets took on average of 1-2 weeks to get a response and many tickets went unanswered completely. We are a development agency and have been doing e-commerce development for over 10 years and have worked with many other carts. What you see on the list of features for Magento is attractive at first glance but the cost and time needed to customize and get it working the way you want ends up taking extremely more time then other shopping cart systems where you would just need to buy add-on modules. Just for comparison, the total cost of development was about $20,000 (after the $12k license) and that still left many customizations still undone. Finding developers who are experienced with Magento Enterprise is very difficult and you usually need to go overseas, but even then, most have only dealt with the community version… and there are differences.
I would say map out your must-have functionality and find a cart that has a great support community and is easy to customize. Our favorite cart to-date is still Miva Merchant. Even though you need to purchase modules to customize it, the modules are easy to install and only cost $20-$80 each. Their support community is the best I’ve ever worked with. A Miva Merchant site can be completely built start to finish for less then just the license cost of Magento and development time? Magento = 3-4 months, Miva = 2 weeks. Not to mention that the Magento license fee is yearly.
I have had such a bad experience with Magento, that it has become my mission to warn people… and I’m a developer who knows how to program it!! If you are not a programmer, I wouldn’t even consider Magento.
