Magento - Do you need to be an expert to use it?

Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform. nothing like a wordpress cart. With greater power comes more complexity and it does help to have some programming experience if you run into issues (like in your case an unsupported language).

However as someone who has SEO clients using it and having written about Magento theres no way I would say it takes $10,000 worth of expertise. Quite a bit of features can be added through extensions (some free some not). even though I have programming experience I have been able to do quite a bit from just the admin panel and I know non programmers that do just fine with it as well

You do in my opinion need to have adequate hosting. trying to run it on a shared environment can spell disaster and due to its features it can slow things down considerably on a poor server but nooo don't shell out that kind of cash unless you are talking about a large site with lots of products and feature needs.

for that kind of money you could program something from scratch to your needs (but to be fair magento is battle tested and more mature than anything you would build from scratch).

Hi Clapper,

You may also want to consider OpenCart as it functions well for several ecommerce stores I have running.

There are plenty of extensions to help to achieve what you require and there is a large community of users and people who can help with various aspects if required.

One of the extension writing companies out there is Isenselabs and they have some really useful modules or extensions.

One that you may want to take a look at is their auto language and auto currency detection. I've pasted a link to the extension inside open cart below:
Extensions - AutoDetect - Automatically Detect Currency and Language

For Magento you would most likely want to run it on a VPS or dedicated server to get the best out of it.

Best regards,

Ozi

Mike,
I am really sorry, I might point out my points in a wrong way but I found beneficial for Clapper to utilize budget on growing instead of burning it out just for the idea of having technology gamble. I believe we discuss business here and it is always about money.I find spending 10K for something you can get in range of 45$ a month simply useless and stupid. Maybe I am wrong but we are ll here to help each other and advise the best solutions. Magento is a great platform in case you have such unique business model which is not covered by Saas based model solutions- roughly 2% of companies might need it. Savings might be used for ads or SEO services instead of keeping alive developers- sorry simply makes no sense for me fo me to burn money just for the idea of having in-house development.

I understand that you might not hear of us since we do not spend on adds- but Deloitte did: Awards and honourable mentions
I worked for Teco Group, Siemens, Voipstitch, Tieto and what I have learnt from them- even biggest die due time to market.... If I had offended you in any way please excuse my arrogance of logic business minded opinion..

I'm very comfortable on Wordpress but have dabbled in Joomla, Drupal and Magento.

I built a test Magento website just for kicks to see how to do it and I can tell you it's a rather overly complex backend.

It may take you a few weeks and a 100 hours or so of playing around with the interface before you get a feel for everything that can be done. The free CE edition is nice and powerful and there are hundreds of paid extentions out there to do just about everything you need done.

The major down sides come when you need to customize as Magento experts cost a lot of money. That 10K you where quoted is about right for a customized interface with all the bells.

With Magento 2.0 now out you may also run into comparability issues using older extensions that are not currently fully compatible.

There is nothing wrong with using Magento for websites with hundreds or thousands of products. However if you have less products I would reccomend you go with something else.

If you do go with Magento there are hosts out there that specialize in magento hosting and I would strongly urge you to go with 1 of them as they often offer free support on helping to fix common issues you will run into.

After the initial dev costs I would fully expect you to have to pay out a few grand each year on up keep to the magento site.

Just my two cents. I'm not a magento expert but I have done a complete test ecom site with it and have done admin work inside several Magento sites to setup a few extentions and perform SEO work.

Try on WooCommerce or Shopify instead. I think they are cheaper and easier to setup and use. Plus, they are professional enough for your site.
Regards,