Magento Frustrates Me

Now for those of you that love Magento (I'm sure there are few), hear me out. Magento is a very robust platform. Magento can do everything under the sun with a price. That price tag can get EXTREMELY costly if you aren't careful. I'm sure most of you who have worked with Magento in the past know exactly what I am talking about. I know I said I wouldn't mention platforms I hate specifically, but I just can't help but want to spread the truth. Magento was an uphill battle. Not only was it stressful at the company I worked for, but it was a stressful program to onboard, implement, and maintain. Still with me? Excellent, well, let's see if you can take the shit storm that I had to deal with for the past year and a half.

Onboarding

Well, you would think that a company that has been around for over ten years they might have figured out most of it by now. I can assure you that this is quite the opposite. We all have had that one friend that just can't seem to find the right partner, always late, usually consumes too much alcohol and can't remember the day prior, yea, that's Magento. Along with a bunch of other baggage. Magento's onboarding process is the support team partitioning a server with the space necessary to host your staging and production servers. Partitioning servers takes them about a week...A WEEK. We will get into that a bit later in this article. Regardless the onboarding process is pretty simple for Magento.

Done? HA, no, we aren't. Unless you have about $1.2 million- $10 million budget to your website, you had better get a developer. If you are a smaller company that wants to use Magento, then you will have to outsource this job. After paying an experienced developer $100k+ a year, you will now have to onboard this developer. Explain precisely what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by, and start to move over existing data.

After you are done bringing your developer up to speed, now they need to allocate resources/time to your project. Allocating resources could take another week or a few days. Yes, 2-3 weeks in, and we haven't even started anything. I have to recommend using some kind of project management software like Trello, Monday, Asana. Whatever is your preference, buy it, and start creating an outline.

The Project

The project itself is the hardest thing you will ever have to endure in your life. Imagine drowning, then just as you thought your life was over, and they brought you back to life. This process continues for as long as it has to. Now, if you have great developers and your company can stick to the timelines in the outline, this process is probably much more straightforward. I, on the other hand, did not have that luxury. So, yes, deadlines were not met, and people were getting impatient about the project not getting completed. Blame me if you'd like, but one person shouldn't have to complete a website launch.

Keep in mind I was doing the work, organizing it, and managing all parties. My day was busy, and by busy, I mean, I had to set an alarm to pee... Now might be a good time to remind you that I had no time to put together a plan for this project. I was shooting from the hip. No one knew what I was doing because they didn't understand what I was doing. I had most, if not all, of the steps laid out in my head but not on paper. In the real world of website building, this is a huge problem. It wouldn't matter what I had on paper because most people didn't know what they wanted, and minds would be made up then changed a day later. I was never able to make my priority list because priorities would change daily.

If you haven't figured out by now the company I worked for and I had some part in messing up this project. So, Magento is NOT all to blame here. We went through 3 development companies for this project. Yup, you read that right, three in under two years. So, I had to onboard two new developers in this process. And yet again, we didn't have a plan or a leg to stand on. So, the developers got upset with us. There is no plan that we could show. I am not blaming any of the developers or any of the external companies that were helping us. I am blaming mostly us and Magento. I think our company might have been on the same level as Magento. Bad products and even worse organization.

The Support

Now the Support we received from our developers was TOP Notch, even the ones from India. All of the development companies trying to help us were so much more organized than the company and me. They didn't show their frustration, but I knew it was there. I also bet we weren't the only client who couldn't get their shit together.

As for Support from Magento, it was very few. You can submit a ticket. Sure, send as many tickets as possible. They will get back to you, in 24 hours or so. And most of the time, they will get back to you in 24 hours just saying that they obtained your message, and they are looking into it. If they aren't doing that, then they are sending you on some wild goose chase through their documentation. I went to school for computer science. I know how to program. Their documentation is like Narnia. A mysterious world of magic and answers to questions you will never find. Unless you are a developer, a MAGENTO developer, you won't be able to understand the documentation, which brings me back to what I said earlier, HIGHER someone. Don't try to make this work without an expert or 5 in the office.

I am also mentioning all this because when we were sold the platform initially, we were lied to. Magento is supposed to be friendlier to a nonprogramming crowd. That was a load of bull shit. That is, ALL Support does is directs you to the documentation mostly with coded solutions. I am not a PHP developer/Magento developer. So, I always had to hand the solution over to our developers and wait a week or two for a problem that we needed to be fixed the day of.

Magento As a Platform

Magento is not built for the newbie website builder. Magento likes to think their platform is, but Magento is about 15-20 years away from that. Their support does not match up to any of the other platforms support. They need to really build up that department. If you are selling software, your support department had better be a reliable team. The only problem is they can't hire anyone who really knows the platform, you want to know why? It takes probably over a year or so to become certified. In almost anything. And being in Support, you want to know all if not most aspects of the platform as possible. Not only that, but you have to take a test to become certified. I can tell you right now if you want to become a Magento "expert" prepare to go to school for a long time. Probably being a lawyer or doctor has a better pay off.

Adobe bought Magento out. Let us hope that now Magento is going to take a step in the right direction. I think they need to reshape their marketing. They are trying to reach everyone. And everyone isn't their client. Their client is someone with cashflow. With an excellent bank account and plenty of people, the mom, and pop shop, the companies still in a critical growth setting are not their clients. There are just way too many problems with this kind of open-source software. There are also many cooks in the kitchen and not too many regulations in place. The Magento asset store is just a mess. There are regulations, but my god, most of the accessible extension install features of Magento, don't work. So, there is no point in thinking you can install an extension without a developer.

I want to conclude by saying that I have never gotten more emails of consideration, marketing, and genuine concern from Magento until we left the platform. I feel that Magento doesn't care about their customers until they cancel or until they are prospecting. I did get help from our project manager over at Magento and one of the developers often. They are excluded. I mean the company as a whole. There need to be significant changes done for Magento to stand against the competition. Marketing needs to be retargeted, Support needs to be beefed up. The company itself needs a restructure—some new people/ideas. Adobe, please save them!

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