Magento e-commerce

In the last 10 years the online population has grown enormously, and everyone is perfectly used to buying products online. In fact for the majority of people the web is the first place that they look when researching where to buy a product. So if you are looking to build an online store, you need to build it from a solid foundation.

Sweet-Apple designs and develops Magento eCommerce stores starting from £1000. We’ve helped businesses in Bath, Bristol, Devizes, Salisbury, Warminster, Chippenham and Calne get their Magento ecommerce sites designed, custom themes and Extensions developed, massively complex product catalogs rapidly imported and payment gateways configured. Whether you’re using Sagepay, Worldpay, Google Checkout or Paypal, shipping internationally or domestically, have complex shipping and tax rules, we’ve been there, done that, sorted it out for the customer with minimal fuss.

Why Magento?

As many website owners have learned to their cost, choosing the right eCommerce platform to build your website is critical. Over the years we’ve seen dozens of eCommerce solutions come and go and hence we’ve got a good idea of what is required to start your site with solid foundations. Whilst Zen Cart, CubeCart and OS Commerce all have their plus points, they also have a number of limitations that can restrict what you can do with them.

However Magento covers the vast majority of scenarios straight from the box. It’s got every Product, Shipping and Payment Gateway option you can think of built in. The administration area has a clean, functional and extremely powerful set of tools to let you manage your store easily, quickly and profitably. And for web developers it enables us to modify the functionality without modifying the “Core” files. This is important – every other eCommerce package I have used has ended up being a maintenance headache, as custom functionality got mixed in with the Core files, leading to sites breaking when security patches needed to be made. Magento lets you keep custom design and functionality completely separate, allowing you to quickly and reliably apply security patches.

Does Magento have weaknesses?

There’s no such thing as a perfect product. Magento has a number of areas that could be improved upon, performance being my main bugbear. If you try to install Magento on cheap Shared Hosting provided by companies like 1and1, you’ll have a nightmare. Magento likes a lot of resources to run smoothly. Secondly, importing Products from spreadsheets can sometimes be problematic, especially when the products are complex with dozens of options. There are a number of relatively inexpensive Extensions that can help here. Lastly, Magento has a much steeper learning curve for the developer. WordPress this ain’t! You need a good understanding of Object Orientated Programming and a calm head to make the most of it. Fortunately, Sweet-Apple has all of that and more…

Looking for a Freelance Magento Developer?

The majority of our work is as a freelance web developer working for web designers or agencies who don’t have the internal resources required for Magento projects. We sometimes work for agencies who just know we can get get it done more cost-effectively than their internal teams. All our work is “white-labelled” under your brand and any custom Modules are named-spaced under either your company or the client’s name.

Start your Magento development now

If you’d like to know more about our eCommerce services, get a quote, or just talk through a project, please don’t hesitate to give us a call on 01380 830224 or send us an email.