
EBay Inc. Agrees to Acquire Magento - bjonathan
http://www.ebayinc.com/content/press_release/20110606006390
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cookiecaper
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.

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timdorr
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.

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

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code_duck
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?

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mnazim
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.

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jasonlotito
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.

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

~~~
mtw
<http://spreecommerce.com>

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theseanstewart
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.

~~~
hackernewz
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.

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

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rohi81
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.

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theklub
Should of picked up shopify instead.

~~~
mattblalock
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...]

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gersh
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.

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mildweed
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...

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pbreit
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.

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

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cal5k
Wow, that was fast. Does anybody know how big the deal was?

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nbauman
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.

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

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olalonde
No, Zend Framework dates from ~2006.

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mgkimsal
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.

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

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

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mattblalock
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!

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dreamdu5t
I'd be willing to bet eBay is preparing to use Magento to roll their own turn-
key hosted storefront service.

~~~
pbreit
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.

