EBay Inc. Agrees to Acquire Magento | Hacker News Reader

EBay Inc. Agrees to Acquire Magento

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82 pointsbjonathan43 comments

Magento is horrible. Has anyone here ever used it? It is bad. Makes sense that eBay would acquire it, I guess. My hopes are not high for the platform.

This.

It's horrible.

I can't stop reading it as "Magneto".

It's incredibly over-engineered. Just look at the templating system and see how far down you have to go in a directory tree just to make a simple edit on the page. The code itself is too fragmented to follow. A lot of the mental overhead from working on it comes from just having to remember where functions are in the code base.

it made me think of Joomla (you need a beefy server for what seems to be a simple site)

Thank Zend Framework for that.

It's the best free eCommerce solution. Not that that is saying a lot.

I used to think that but Spree Commerce is pretty nice. And Rails, too.

It is a successor to osCommerce. You wouldn't say it's horrible if you took a look at osCommerce's source code.

Spaghetti code or not, osCommerce ran on any cheap web hosting plan you had. Magento will eat up half a gigabyte of memory just to show a storefront.

It ran, but it didn't "work". Spaghetti is an understatement.

osCommerce and their codebase being more horrible than Magento doesn't make Magento any less horrible.

I completely agree. It's painful to develop in and painful to use from a client perspective. I used it for some client projects a few years back and ended up just migrating them to spree after getting tired of client calls every time they attempted to update a product listing.

Interesting. Magento is the WordPress of commerce software: feature rich and popular, but not particularly well written, and tied to PHP/MySQL. Like WP, it is based upon a questionable custom framework.

I'd love to see a well done, customizable, open source ecommerce system for a language that I'd actually want to use. For best hope of popularity, Django or Rails makes sense. Last time I checked around for Django ecommerce projects, I didn't see anything grand.

I'm going to be working on stuff like this over the summer; anyone have a suggestion for a Django or Rails project to improve or adopt?

Don't know much about rails but for Django there

- Satchmo(http://satchmoproject.com/)

- Lightening Fast Shop (http://www.getlfs.com/)

More info

- http://djangopackages.com/grids/g/ecommerce/

- http://readncode.com/blog/the-state-of-ecommerce-in-django/

I used Satchmo sometime back and it's a very good but low level solution. You can do a lot with it.

I did not use LFS but it seems something which can help you setup a cart very quickly, like pinax does for social sites.

EDIT: Fully agree about Magento/WP. From a cursory look into Magento internals seemed of questionable design and unnecessarily complicated.

If you're familiar with Django, I'd check out django-shop or satchless. They're much more developer geared, and a little less "finished product".

Magento is also a huge resource hog. Wordpress at least is somewhat tame in that department.

At least as a dev you can get WP to do what you want pretty easily, regardless of how bad the code is. In comparison Magento is far more convoluted.

The most prevalant rails one is Spree: http://spreecommerce.com

I'm in the opening stages of building a spree site right now, and at this early point it seems really good. The developers are responsive on irc and on the list, and the repo gets regular pushes.

Its a rails3 engine, and makes full use of this and other rails3 features, plus the devs have extensive plans to use the various 3.1 improvements. It's really modular; the spree gem is actually a meta-gem with deps pointing to other gems, 'spree-core', 'spree-auth', 'spree-promo' etc.

You make all your customisations to it in the same way, by decorating the various core classes, following the same pattern as the spree submodules themselves.

Oh and it has shitloads of tests, both rspec and cucumber/capybara.

Basically it seems pretty sweet.

Magento's Blog Post: http://www.magentocommerce.com/blog

They've also prepared a PDF containing an FAQ covering details of the acquisition. Congrats to the Magento team! I remember them launching Magento a few years ago on the then, still young, Zend Framework. Glad to see things turn out so well for them.

Now would be a great time to build a new FOSS e-commerce platform that runs on commodity hosting.

http://spreecommerce.com

I have several clients using Magento and it's definitely the best e-commerce solution available right now. In the beginning there were a lot of performance issues, but most of those problems have been addressed now. I'm wondering what's going to happen with the free version of Magento. They don't mention anything about it.

The performance issues have just been masked with caching. The template layer makes hundreds of useless classes each request. Could speed it up 40% or so with flyweight pattern on the template classes. Could reduce memory usage each request by not using XML config files and not included configs for modules that are turned off.

What CMS would you recommend in it's stead? Free would of course be best.

I think this is a really strategic move for e-bay. They are now catering to the whole eco-system by providing a e-commerce platform (magento), payment integration (via paypal) and complete fulfillment back end via GSI commerce. If executed well they have a good chance at attracting a lot of customers. The biggest advantage is they have huge auction based commerce platform ebay itself to provide cross channel capabilities.

Should of picked up shopify instead.

I'm glad they didn't, it's nearing finished product status (from my perspective) and I haven't seen a lot of innovation from them since inception... I'd like to love them more, but I just cant.

[note: I've developed multiple Shopify themes and Magento, admined a Magento store for 3 years, and developed some pretty custom things for both platforms. i am in both communities, or I like to think so...]

Magento can't even do a shopping cart properly. The default is a really messy shopping cart, and it is a pain to customize it. You gotta hack everything just to make a one page checkout.

This finally makes sense why Paypal has had their documentation on x.com for so long. x.com == x.commerce

And here, I thought they'd been wasting a perfectly good domain name for a long time...

I'm surprised they don't do something nifty with the x.com domain. I had some ideas when I was still there. Housing developer content seems pretty lame.

Magento CrunchBase page: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/magento

Wow, that was fast. Does anybody know how big the deal was?

Not sure how big, but I would actually say it hasn't been fast. Magento has been in existence in some form for almost 10 years, starting as a product they used with consulting clients. This has been a loooong road for the Varien team.

So, they've been using Zend Framework for 10 years?

No, Zend Framework dates from ~2006.

I think that was the point of the 'ZF' comment. Whatever varien had as an ecommerce package before their ZF uptake was likely different enough from what Magento was that it's not terribly accurate or useful to say "magento's been around for 10 years".

Magento in its current form has been around for ~4 years.

Wikipedia even indicates that Varien was using osCommerce before Magento was developed, so they likely didn't have a full commerce stack of their own for the last 10 years.

Agreed - would have been more accurate to say Varien rather than Magento.

This is a fair point. Speaks to the idea that most overnight successes are 10 years in the making :-)

Just out of curiosity - does anyone plan on migrating from Magento to another platform as a result of this acquisition?

I've been considering a migration to something else for over a year, but have yet to find any product meeting our needs other than the latest version of Magento... that being said, I have yet to be able to upgrade to that version... something is severely wrong with our DB and we're pretty much stuck in an old version!

I'd be willing to bet eBay is preparing to use Magento to roll their own turn-key hosted storefront service.

They've had prostores.com for quite some time and while it does have a good number of merchants using it, it's far from best-in-class. I would expect much of that to migrate over to Magento (and Magento Go) which is slightly better and more modern. But I don't think my expectations are that high.

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