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Victor Gil Borrego
13,435 PointsDo it by myself with Magento or use something like Weebly, etc?
Hi, my girlfriend is going to launch an online shop and he ask me to build the website.
I've been googling looking for information about online shops and I get two options:
The first one is using a CMS like Magento, and customise it by my self. I don't know anything about Magento, but I have some experience with Wordpress and I hope that it could be similar.
The other option is to use a service like weebly, wix, etc... where they give you almost everything to build an online shop and just customize it, so I don't want to reinvent the wheel.
What do you think? anyone has some experience with Magento or with Weebly ,wix services?
Thanks!
3 Answers

Sam Tay
4,414 PointsI just started working at a company that specializes in Magento. The biggest thing I've learned is that Magento is not intuitive. If you are just building a simple online store, the hassle of learning and configuring Magento will outweigh the benefits of its power and customization. In other words, it might be better to stick with something simpler.

Lauren Clark
33,155 PointsUnless you're building a huge online store with lots of different products, or multiple stores, with products in common (multistore scenario) Magento is really not what you want. It's huge, cumbersome, slow and hard to set up and deal with if you're using the community edition. Magento's hosted option, Magento GO is probably better for this case, but lack any real customisation outside of some rudimentary plugins. Otherwise to set up a Magento store you'll need at least a VPS and some real speed optimisation.
Wix will lack the scope you need to improve your store, you should always plan for growth. For instance; down the line you want to add extra features but Wix won't provide them, or charges a huge amount for them - you have to start from scratch. Your order data and product base may be lost.
Popular eCommerce systems, ones you can host yourself, for small to medium online stores are:
Wordpress's WooCommerce by Woothemes
There are tutorials here on Treehouse for setting up a Wordpress website and using it as a CMS, and a tutorial here for How to build an ecommerce site using WooCommerce

Victor Gil Borrego
13,435 PointsWoww thanks Sam and Lauren for your quick answers! I really appreciate it. I will take a look at the options Lauren wrote, it seems that they could be what I'm looking for.