Many people hate Magento and hate it upto a level where they really do not want to hear anything in favor of it. Most of them have some valid reasons (based on their personal experiences) and many of them hate it just to hate it.

On this page I am compiling a list of complains against Magento as an e-commerce system. I am not going to counter them or justify Magento in light of these complaints, I am compiling this list so you can take a balanced view before taking any decision in favor of or against Magento.

This list can also be used a ‘to do’ list by programmers and consultants to be claim expertise in Magento, because in my view any solution start from the “accepting” that their is some problem or we can say identification of the root cause of problem is necessary before giving any solution.

 I look in the database to find a centralized product table and I’m surprised no such think, oh, wait a denormalized flat table that may or may not be up-to-date

Magento is a huge dump of code. It reminds me a Windows. I really hate it.

The biggest problem about Magento is that it’s a black-box: it’s so huge and complicated, that’s it’s impossible to see what’s going on behind the scenes

slow slow slow slow slow slow slow slow ….

By default it’s just slow. If you’re a developer you’ll probably pull your hairs out if you still have any left after 2 days of coding and accomplishing nothing. Magento you suck!

EAV -> slow and complex. My first idea was to write a handy script reading all products from the old database and imports them into the one Magento uses. Didnt work out.

Rails, Symfony and all these great other web frameworks are convention based. Magento however is configuration based.

I will update this list regularly, even I am thinking about starting a new section where we can discuss possible solutions for some of these issues.

 

Just few days back I worked on website which was hit by a huge surge in search engine traffic and  we needed to put some special condition to make Magento’s session handling efficient. I will write about this in details in next article about Magento