Magento is a great core platform for ecommerce. With practically boundless flexibility and robust features that come built-in, your online store can provide customers with a unique, engaging experience that matches your business.
At the heart, Magento is open-source, which is very much driven by a community of creative and talented developers who are consistently providing updates and improvements. The robust core platform provided by Magento allows their talented industry partners & extension providers to carefully mold it into a store to match unique business needs.
With this in mind, here is our lighthearted take on the functionality Magento “forgot:”
Brands
Currently, there is no easy, built-in method to work with brand functionality. You can filter products by brand, but you can’t create menus with it. If you want to separate products by brand in a drop-down menu, the easiest way to do it within Magento is to create a category for brands.
However, this isn’t easy at all; it quickly becomes clunky and inefficient as you have to recreate the entire category structure for each brand. You end up having to duplicate mass amounts of data – not a very feasible option. That’s where a strong development team comes in handy! Developers can help transform what would have otherwise been a clunky, time-consuming process into something much easier; it just has to be achieved through the right extension or custom development.
Swatches
Magento is a popular platform choice among apparel companies, but swatches seem to be lacking. The product imager does come built-in, but swatches are a little bit different. People want to be able to see what they’re buying; they want to see how the product they want to purchase looks on a person in the sizes/colors available.
If that’s a functionality you want, you’ll have to purchase an extension for it or have it custom-built. That’s the great thing about having such a flexible core platform - with extensions and customization, you have complete control over the look, feel, and function of your online store.
Recurring Profiles
Recurring Profiles are useful and help drive sales for businesses that offer subscription products. The nominal products (recurring items) are an efficient way to schedule orders in advance through PayPal, but they do have some drawbacks:
- They don’t work with configurable, bundle, or grouped products
- Only one nominal item can be in a cart a one time
To make recurring profiles work with configurable products, you would have to set up a separate product for each possible combination. For example, if your nominal product was a pack of protein bars that came in chocolate or vanilla, you would have to have separate products for vanilla and each of its schedules and chocolate and each of its schedules. As a customer, if you wanted chocolate and vanilla protein bars, you would have to make separate purchases of each.
There can only be one nominal item in the shopping cart at a time, and since it’s recurring, it can’t be paired with any other items either, even if it’s another nominal product with the same schedule. Say you order toilet paper on a regular basis and add it to your cart, but you also decide you need a pack of pens, just one – you can’t order them both at the same time. The same issue would happen if you tried to add a recurring paper towel order, even if it was on the same schedule as the toilet paper.
Thankfully, it is possible to rectify these issues with custom development; we’ve done it. With custom development, you can add a nominal item to a cart and add other items as well; you can also allow for multiple nominal products to be added to the same cart, even if they have different schedules. If it weren’t for Magento’s flexibility as a platform, providing a solution like this would have been extremely difficult.
Reporting
Reporting capabilities can be somewhat limited in Magento, especially from the customer service side of things. There is no order tracking available from the admin side; if you have customer service reps that help people fill out orders through the admin section, there’s no native report that tracks it.
It’s difficult to determine who’s contributing, what they’re contributing, and where. There are extensions that can help reporting go further, but it is still limited. Most really useful reports end up being custom coded. Then again, because Magento has a strong core platform that is extremely flexible, we’re able to custom code more useful reports.
Every business is unique. Every online store is not going to look or function exactly the same. Your customers’ needs & wants will be different than those of another industry; why should your stores be locked into the same template or mold? That’s the power of Magento – flexibility & freedom. You have everything you need to get started built into the core platform, the rest is up to you. The platform is fully flexible and completely customizable – you’re in control of your site and able to build a better business.