25+ Magento Templates For Your E-Commerce Business
Magento is a popular open source e-commerce software platform that has a modular architecture and is extremely flexible. It comes with a number of online shop maintenance capabilities. It is also simple to configure and easy to customize. And despite the fact that it was launched just last year, it has been gaining more and more popularity among Web designers and e-business owners.
Magento has a ton of credentials in its pocket from some very big e-solution players. Magento Enterprise Edition, a commercial version aimed at larger companies, was launched just a month ago. The CMS includes such advanced features as marketing, promotional and SEO tools; analytics and reporting; mobile commerce; catalog-management tools. And Magento users have the freedom to customize their store with new themes, templates and plug-ins.
Below you’ll find a showcase of excellent Magento templates for your e-commerce business. Hopefully, these templates and resources will serve you either as an inspiration for your themes, or as the foundation for your customized themes.
Free Magento Templates
Modern Theme | Live Demo | Download
This is an alternative to the default theme created by the Magento core team. It brings a more corporate look and feel, with a clean and simple design.
Magento Classic Theme | Live Demo | Download
Templates-Master’s first free professional Magento theme, the Classic Theme is available in 10 colors, all available for free download. This is CSS3-powered theme, easy to customize and coming with free updates.
Telescope Theme | Live Demo | Download
Created by MagThemes, this theme is very popular in the Magento community. It is freely available for download and has already been downloaded over 6,000 times.
Pet Store Theme | Full Preview | Download
This is the first free Magento theme from Template Monster. Very simple and light design, and easy to customize according to your needs.
Computer Store Theme | Live Demo | Download
When you download this ready-made Web page design, you can practice editing it to gain experience working with this type of theme.
Blue Skin | Live Demo | Download
Another alternative to the Magento default interface, this one with a very minimal design that focuses on the shopping cart.
Electronics Store Theme | Full Preview | Download
This theme has a rugged, mechanical appearance. The strong color and font would show off electronic devices well. To download this theme, just go to the store checkout and pay nothing; you’ll receive the theme by email within 24 hours.
Linen Theme | Live Demo | Download
Another free theme from MagThemes. Linen Theme is very flexible. It has a stretch design (can stretch to fit 90% of your browser window) and a clean and simple layout that draws your customer’s attention to the products.
Eco Fashion | Full Preview | Download
The Eco Fashion e-commerce template is very easy to customize. With minor changes to the CSS and images, you can transform this into your own personal theme. It comes loaded with some key SEO tools, such as lightweight CSS menus and main page content that appears before the column, footer and header blocks.
Girly Store Theme | Live Demo | Download
A free pink theme for stores targeted at girls. Includes theme files, the PSD source file for the logo and fonts. It has the same power as the default Magento template; only some minor changes were made to the CSS, images and theme code, but not the core files. So, you can update to new releases of Magento with no problem.
Refresh | Full Preview | Download
Refresh is a free W3C-compliant, CSS-based template based on the original HTML/CSS template by StyleShout.com. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License, which means you are free to use and modify it for any purpose.
iPhone Optimized Theme | Full Preview | Download
One more alternative skin to the default Magento interface. The very clean layout was created mainly with the iPhone in mind. It includes automatic detection and delivery of packages and themes (templates, skins, CSS, layout) based on the user-agent (client) that can be configured to global, website and store views. This video shows a preview of how Magento looks on the iPhone.
Commercial Magento Templates
HelloPerfect | Live Demo | $99.00
A professional Magento template with a rocking background style. It has a clean and easy-to-navigate Web 2.0-style interface, made with a variety of different types of stores in mind.
JM Purity | Live Demo | Membership starts at $59.00
This template is simple but very clean and professional; users can customize the color a lot in just a few simple steps. JoomlArt has integrated its standard user tool into JM Purity, which enables buyers to control font size and color (default, red and blue) for optimal viewing.
Women’s Store | Live Demo | $185.00
This theme is intended mainly for a women’s accessories store. It’s a Template Monster template, so it obviously comes in multiple sources like PSD, XML, CSS and PHTML. Anyone who appreciates elegant, modern and unusual e-commerce websites will understand that this is more than just another HTML-based template.
HelloUniversal | Live Demo | $99.00
This template is perfect for any type of business and is available in your choice of three fabulous eye-catching colors (red, green, blue). A great start for your new online shop! Comes with the source PSD file.
Lingerie Store | Live Demo | $195.00
Another Template Monster template, this one targeted at female customers. The front page includes a big Flash slideshow gallery to introduce the store and products.
HelloPod | Live Demo | $99.00
This wonderful new theme comes in three colors (orange, blue and green), suitable for any type of online store. With a wonderfully sophisticated design, the theme looks stunning, and the exclusive widget helps it stand out too! It can be edited easily using the PSD files included in the package, and it is very SEO-friendly. Compatible with all major browsers.
Fitness Store | Live Demo | $180.00
This theme is a fantastic addition to the Template Monster Club. It is another very neat and clean old-school design with some compelling features. It has the same flexibility and powerful features that other Template Monster templates are known for, including an adaptable design and layout, a black-and-white color scheme and SEO optimization.
HelloTimes | Live Demo | $99.00
This classy theme from HelloTheme comes in two color schemes (blue and orange or blue and green). It is CSS3-powered and suitable for any type of store. The front page design is very clean and simple and includes a JavaScript content/image slider widget.
JM Mesolite | Live Demo | Membership starts at $59.00
This theme is an exact port of JoomlArt’s famous Joomla-based “Mesolite” template, with the same great features. But you’ll see in this new theme JoomlArt’s first extensions for Magento, namely a category list, product list, product slider and slideshow, all of which optimize the presentation of products to potential customers. The product slider and product list allow you to localize your store by displaying a specific groupings of products (such as ones based on best buys, top-rated, most reviewed, etc.).
Flower Store | Live Demo | $188.00
This incredible Magento template features a clean and beautiful new look and feel, designed to allow for quick and easy customization. Suitable for any kind of store, and comes with a dark background and eye-catching header design.
HelloModern | Live Demo | $99.00
This professional template has a clean and easy-to-navigate interface and is made with a variety of different types of stores in mind. It includes a clean and professional Web 2.0-style design, with very fast-loading HTML code. Compatible with all major browsers, and comes with fonts, PSD files and instructions.
Art & Photo Store | Live Demo | $195.00
This template features a clean and simple design and plenty of Template Monster’s horsepower under the hood, with a front-page Flash gallery, perfect for displaying products. It’s optimized with the latest Web technologies to increase your website’s efficiency.
Megastore | Live Demo | $149.00
A very professional-looking Magento theme for all kinds of stores, but mainly larger stores with many categories and products. Many optional widgets and product-image magnifiers are available. Supports four-column category pages.
Grunge Theme | Live Demo | $149.00
Grunge Theme is perfect for skateboarding, BMX biking, snowboarding and other extreme sports stores. It comes with a new “high-slide” gallery for product images, transparent pages, cross-browser compatibility and a new color scheme.
HelloMinty | Live Demo | $99.00
Another HelloThemes template, featuring a clean and lightweight design based on modern standards and using the full power of Magento, including a JavaScript content/image slider widget, which is simply great for displaying featured products. This theme comes in three colors (pink, blue and green). Suitable for any type of store.
Times Universal Theme | Live Demo | $154.00
The home page layout of the Times Universal Theme has three columns and JavaScript product and image sliders that are easy to use and SEO-friendly. It can be used for any kind of store that needs a classic look. Product tabs and a lightbox image module come already installed.
Further Resources
Check these out for more templates and Magento-related content:
- HelloThemes Template Club
- CMSTheme: Magento
- Premium Magento Themes
- eCommerce Themes: Magento Themes
- TemplateMonster Template Club
- JoomlArt Template Club
- Official Magento Knowledge Base
Related articles
You may also want to take a look at the following related articles that we have previously published on Smashing Magazine:
- 35 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates
- 35 Beautiful Commercial And Free Joomla Templates
- 100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates
- 30 Free High-Quality WordPress Themes
- 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
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Daniel Kerr
May 5th, 2009 2:32 pmMagento is probably the worst coded shopping cart system out there.
Each template takes around 100 hours of work because you have to mess around with with xml files and loads of other stuff.
It was also coded by some Russian coders and not an US company. The US company is just a media company using the system as a marketing tool.
Its also buggy as hell!
Well done smashing magazine for promoting lipstick on a pig.
Noel Cosgrave
October 12th, 2010 7:28 amDaniel,
As the developer of OpenCart, your opinion on a rival product could hardly be described as unbiased. As things stand, a quick web search will pull up plenty of instances where legitimate security and/or design issues were raised with you and received a puerile, expletive-ridden and ego-laden response. I wonder can the same be said of the Magento team?
esse
May 5th, 2009 2:44 pmHi Daniel,
What would you recommend? OsCommerce is getting pretty old although it does do a propper job. Any others?
PG
May 5th, 2009 2:55 pmUm, I don’t agree with Daniel’s assessment. I don’t know who codes it, but I do know that Magento is probably the best open-source cart. It’s really simple to integrate once you get the hang of it.
It’s an easy install as well with SimpleScripts, so don’t listen to either of us. Go take a look!
stroke
May 5th, 2009 2:56 pm@Daniel Kerr
Well, you obviously don’t know much about coding. Magento is the first example of what an open source PHP web application should be. Coding for magento is simply brilliant experience.
BRYAN
May 5th, 2009 3:05 pmPrepare a high performance hosting if you plan to use Magento… To be honest, I am really tired of the installation of magento, its error rate is too high.
I know that it is highly recommended by some people from its good architecture, but it is really not easy to approach, at least for this moment!
adwin
May 5th, 2009 3:09 pmnice one .. thank you :)
it is pretty hard to get meganto templates on the internet
stroke
May 5th, 2009 3:32 pm@BRYAN
Yes, I agree with you here.
I see Magento more as a starting point or a framework for a company that does e-commerce and has professional developers.
It is hard to compare it with something like Joomla or osCommerce. It’s just not click and you’re ready on a $5 dollar hosting. But if you have a group of developers to make a web shop for a big and important customer, Magento is just ideal choice.
Stephan
May 5th, 2009 3:55 pmOmg this must be the worst post at SM ever. Most of these designs isnt even worth to be mentioned in the cemetery. The only one that looked ok was the megastore-theme from the silverthemes.com-guys and the free ones from the magento-team.
Please make the rules more stringent next time SM or else i need to abandon you! :-(
Chris
May 5th, 2009 4:10 pmSave yourselves the trouble. Find something else. Magento is promising, but lacks in some very basic features — features you’d expect. Sales reports by products, for example. Would you believe you can’t generate a report of how many sales you’ve had for Product X? Believe it. It’s true.
Mark
May 5th, 2009 4:18 pmOther recent OS options for ecommerce are prestashop, shopify and silverstripe w/ ecommerce module. SM – Would be great to have a shootout between them
Daniel Kerr
May 5th, 2009 4:38 pmstroke are you on crack?
Its the worst coded! It uses all the bad code practises. Ever hear of UML. Where you can visually design the program before touching the code. you can not do that with magento because it only uses static function calls. this is not true OOP.
I also tried this for a client and it crashed after 30 products.
I know it was russian developers because I spoke with the developers of joomla how tried to make a bridge between the 2. The decided to use my project instead.
Try my project http://www.opencart.com
Natzca
May 5th, 2009 5:02 pm@Mark – prestashop looks interesting, have you used it?
Evan
May 5th, 2009 6:27 pmYea, the dedicated server ‘requirement’ to run magento properly keeps me using oscommerce, zencart, foxycart for small-scale e-commerce projects.
Would love to hear from more people who have successfully upgraded to magento from another solution.
Also, my brain is still calling it magneto for now because of the x-men comics lol.
One last thing. Abandoning SM because of a few posts you don’t like is just silly. That’s like dropping out of high school because you had one bad gym teacher junior year.
I DO THIS FOR A LIVING
May 5th, 2009 7:02 pmSERIOUSLY?
How much did the Russian Virgin mafia pay you to post this crap. You lost ALL credibility just now. You just sent every fan of this site to website hell, unsupported, indecipherable, bugged HELL.
Whoever is responsible for this f-ing garbage needs to be sat down ad talked to.
Don’t EVER forget industry standard and your responsibility to new designers.
The devil on my shoulder says “yes! Send them here! The year they spend either giving up or trying to figure this crap out, I’ll be that far ahead”.
Not me though. Been there, done that. Have you guys?!?!?!?!
Mark
May 5th, 2009 7:42 pm@Natzca – Haven;t used prestashop but agree that it looks pretty nice and a lot more straight forward than Magento
Kevin Miller
May 5th, 2009 7:55 pmI think you should take this post down. What kind of post is that? It’s an ad right. Otherwise you’ve got to be kidding because most of the “templates” you posted here were not even worth spending even a minute.
Speaking of Magento, tried it. And whenever I here its name it smells like revolting stench.
If you want to waste your time with something, go watch porn. don’t try Magento.
John R.
May 5th, 2009 8:12 pmExcellent platform and highly recomended. It’s clear most of the people commenting here are completely out of their league and quite clueless.
One of the best eCommerce platforms on the market and best of all its open source and free.
Good post SM (althogh the templates are not that great and not many available for free).
John
Cameron
May 5th, 2009 8:20 pm@John R.
True. People who lack skill will find this a hard software package to use, and will most likely come and post comments like ‘I DO THIS FOR A LIVING’.
Martin
May 5th, 2009 8:39 pmI have been following Magento for quite a time now and saw the evolution of this product …. It is by far the most professional, cutting edge e-commerce platform available in the market and carries with it without a doubt amazing prospects
Anders
May 5th, 2009 9:18 pmI’ve only been reading SM for a few months, but judging from (too) many of the comments posted, readers here are no better than teens throwing obscenities around in a music forum. How on earth can you call yourself professionals acting the way you do, posting the comments that you do. I for one would never hire a designer/developer/etc that acts in that fashion. I sincerely hope you treat your customers differently to how you appear online.
lowlight
May 5th, 2009 9:19 pmI hope someone here can find some good Prestashop themes! Prestashop is great (but being beta, has a few glitches, but still stable enough for a live site if you spend some time on it) but all the themes I have come across are all basically CSS tweaks on the original default theme.
Jimmy
May 5th, 2009 9:46 pmPrestashop is also a good solution, but it’s difficult to find free and good template for that system… maybe here at SmashingMagazine you can do something ??
Dave
May 5th, 2009 10:36 pmI’ve recently launched a Magento powered store at http://www.carbonfibergear.com/direct
I’m currently going through the process of doing a complete design overhaul as I just launched my new design on the main blog site. Regardless, I’ve been able to use Magento now for about a month or so, and I’m thoroughly impressed with its features. No shopping cart is perfect, as I’ve found…none of them do EXACTLY what I wanted, but this came the closest, and it was free. I wasn’t about to pay Shopify $24-$299/month PLUS transaction fees. The transaction fee is what really kills it for me. Aside from credit cards, you can sure as hell bet I don’t want to even give .5% of all of my gross sales (including shipping) just to have a hosted eCommerce system.
While the learning curve with Magento was STEEP, once I figured the majority of things out, it’s fairly intuitive…and there’s reasons for setting up the templating/architecture the way they do. There have been a few gripes I’ve had, but mostly I’ve had a good experience. The gripes I’ve had I’m able to overcome for now, and I hope that they fix in upcoming releases. For software that is free, it’s awesome. I use osCommerce on an old eCommerce site I’ve had for a while, and Magento hands down puts it to shame.
Also – as other people mentioned, it’s fairly server intensive, but the latest versions seems to be 10 fold better than before. It looks like they’re working on improving performance. I had been following development since the way beginning (before it was released), and there were many times where I had played around with it, and decided against it for mainly performance reasons. Now that I’m live with the latest version, it’s not bad at all. Also, installation can come with its issues, it’s very picky about what it requires to work…so that is definitely another pain to overcome (for example it took me forever when testing locally to realize you can’t use http://localhost, you must use http://127.0.0.1 or else you’ll never get in the admin.
Documentation on their side is starting to get somewhat outdated, and I’m looking forward to them updating what they can. Hope this is all useful to anybody considering it, or that has used it in the past but hasn’t given it another try.
Aside from that, some of the templates in the article were good, but most of them were not. I know that there aren’t a lot of templates out there, which is part of the problem…but hopefully more awareness on the product like this, will also help drive it to be a better and better product over time.
Ejaz Siddiqui
May 5th, 2009 10:43 pmEither you agree or not, one thing is clear magento has the most visually appealing designs any ecommerce store may have.
But you must have professional and dedicated developer to do it.
Also it is not for people with very low budget as it requires considerable expense on setup, customization and maintenance.
Nevertheless, a very good post.
JohnSmith
May 5th, 2009 10:55 pmboring ugly templates…
Santo
May 5th, 2009 10:58 pmI have been evaluating quite a few e-commerce solutions these past months and I can only say that Magento outperforms all other I have tested so far.
Those saying it is hard to install… huh? It’s not different from all the others, click, click and you are ready to go. Buggy? Not what I have experienced yet and it runs well on a “standard” hosting solution.
No, I think it is a really good platform. The next platform I’m about to test is Prestashop so we’ll see how those two compares.
/My 2
Jimmyz
May 5th, 2009 10:58 pmWhat about stop complaining and designing your own template ?
Sean Ravenwood
May 5th, 2009 11:20 pmHaving just setup Magento in a breeze and almost finished reading all the doco to get a grip on it so i am confident to tackle making my own themes. I would say its a pretty reasonable system and quite a useful article to see examples of what can be done with it.
HollsK
May 5th, 2009 11:29 pmEeesh. I found Magento to be an absolute nightmare. I had a horrendous time with it. It often seemed that the developers had purposefully obfuscated the code as much as possible to encourage customers to pay for integration and customisation instead of doing it themselves. Working with it was an incredibly unpleasant experience. Another thing I found with it was that it was as slow as a dog on my development box – I’m no server admin, and I never did find a way to speed it up, even after doing all the tweaks I could find in their support forums short of “buy a Mac”. It’s the only application I’ve ever had response time issues with running on localhost.
Prestashop, on the other hand, I adore. It’s MVC structure is a lot more Rails-like, so it’s quite a bit more intuitive, and it doesn’t rely on rakes of XML for changes. To those of you posting who have had success with Magento, I’m impressed by your dedication and your resistance to pain ( :p ), but it’s not for me.
Olivier
May 6th, 2009 12:03 amAnyone knows how magento compares to Drupal with either http://drupal.org/project/ecommerce or http://drupal.org/project/ubercart?
Daniel
May 6th, 2009 12:06 amI have to agree with the negative comments about Magento (the name still makes me shudder). On the surface, it looks efficient and snazzy, but wading through through the hundreds of files, deep and confusing directory structure and absolutely terrible, terrible documentation for a month, I ended up developing my own system. I was very close to finishing the project, but the final deal breaker was the way the products were handled. To upload a product with 10 different sizes (like shoes for example), you would have to upoad 10 different “simple” products, and then create a “compound” product that englobed them all. If my client wanted to upolad 100 different shoes, he would have to create 1100 products!
It may be “free” and “open source”, but that’s just to sucker you in, so that when you get stuck (and you will) you will need to pay them for help.
Pandjarov
May 6th, 2009 12:38 amIt takes me 20-30 minutes to make a WP/Joomla template from a photoshop file. In magento that would take days. Its template system is simply disgusting.
I would recommend you to try PrestaShop if you can test things around with your shop :)
shizm
May 6th, 2009 12:40 am@Stephan – i fully agree! Worst post ever. This designs are… !@$!@#^
Ivan
May 6th, 2009 12:41 amMagento is awesome – but most of these templates are unusable – if you’re serious about your online business do yourself a favour and don’t even consider any of those. Every amateur out there got them by now, get yours professionally done.
I’ve been working with Magento since it was beta and it’s a powerful solution. It has a very steep learning curve but once you get it, it’s a piece of cake.
Shame on Smashing Magazine for promoting those template stores – we don’t want those type of sites here.
piervix
May 6th, 2009 12:41 amand now magento is not free… why?
Diego
May 6th, 2009 12:44 amI disagree with what people wrote; installing Magento is a fairly easy process and pays off quickly. Right now Magento stands out as one of the most professional products in the market and keeps improving.
moa
May 6th, 2009 2:29 amok,
the themes are really ugly, for sure…and that just don’t make me wanna try this…
but what for e-commerce ? joomla, presta, os(out dated no ?)
joomla has a quite good reputation on a side, but, we never know, talking about : seo, speed, themes, free or not…
quite complicate for a young one like me…
SM, write a tutorial to help finding the good path !!!
Ryan
May 6th, 2009 2:37 amdkumar!!!! this is the worst SM post……….
SM through out useless authors like this kumar fool!
indian crap!
pezi
May 6th, 2009 2:39 am@piervix:
Magento is still free. But they have released a Enterprise edition as well.
Compare the different editions here
As someone who spends a lot of time in the Magento irc channel, I can tell you that most people think the learning curve is steep, and not all make it all the way up. But those who do, are able to easily customize the looks and the feel of Magento.
Have a look in a Magento Showcase – Magento can look awesome, and some of the live stores mentioned on that site, really does prove that.
Jesse
May 6th, 2009 5:10 amMagento is a slick E-commerce platform for home businesses etc. However, I would not use it for large businesses that rely on online sales, but then again I’m a biased .NET Developer.
test
May 6th, 2009 5:11 amworst post ever!
Jash Sayani
May 6th, 2009 5:44 amDoes anyone know about setting up a marketplace with Magento where people can buy and sell items ?
Thanks.
David
May 6th, 2009 6:07 amStay away from Magento, is the worst piece of software ever.
Endre
May 6th, 2009 6:18 amJash: You’ve got MagentoConnect from Magento itself, but its really not optimal.
We’re working on building up a really great Magento Journal-site at http://www.magjournal.com with tips and tricks from developers and designers – to developers and designers. This is mainly because we think the blog and “tips” from the Magento isnt that good and also the site is soooo slow.
If someone of you’re interested in contributing let us know!
Leandro Corrêa
May 6th, 2009 6:33 amMagento Pros:
- It’s free
- Opensource
Magento Cons:
- Server intensive
- Template system too confusing
Tom
May 6th, 2009 6:36 amI use ubercart for drupal. It is not “finished” but when is open-source really finished anyway..Anyway I’m happy with it..it has a big community for support and questions, and the drupal cms is also great to work with.
Yannick
May 6th, 2009 6:38 amUnless you want multilanguage support for ubercart…
circus
May 6th, 2009 6:42 amWow, why all the hate? Magento looks pretty cool. Stop with the stupid “this is appalling!” bullcrap. If you don’t like the thread topic, DON’T POST.
Heck, you call yourselves professionals. At least ACT professional.
I’d like to see more stuff about Magento.
treebeard
May 6th, 2009 7:35 amWORST SHOPPING CART EVER… It’s a web designer’s nightmare. This cart DOES NOT WORK OUT OF THE BOX. You need to code the content right into the php files too, so your clients can’t manage their website from the backend. AWEFUL. And takes 10 years to design the frontend, which ends up being extremely buggy. I lost money on a project using Magento and had to go purchase X-cart (which I highly recommend if you want to get your project done in a timely manner and without bugs). DON’T USE MAGENTO. You’ll regret it…
Shame on SM for posting such a useless article, and promoting such a crappy solution…
circus: this is a “comment” and we are here to share our thoughts on the article above.
brandon
April 13th, 2010 6:07 amSounds like you are an amateur coder and “created” your own bugs. Learn to code before you advance to Magento.
Englestone
May 6th, 2009 8:20 amThese designs are definitely sub par compared to the usual high standard of design I like to see on SM.
– Lee
PG
May 6th, 2009 8:22 amAnyone else sense there’s a bit of trolling going on here? Magento may not satisfy everyone’s needs, but it can’t reasonably be called the worst shopping cart ever. I don’t understand why some posters here feel the need to be so agressively against it.
HollsK
May 6th, 2009 8:31 am@PG: “Magento may not satisfy everyone’s needs, but it can’t reasonably be called the worst shopping cart ever. I don’t understand why some posters here feel the need to be so agressively against it.”
I honestly don’t think anybody is trolling, lol. It really is a difficult system to work with. I’m not hysterically anti-Magento, but I can fully appreciate how the people who are feel. I don’t rely on other people’s templates to do my work, I’ve got to build them from scratch, so the polarity of people saying “it’s easy!” to people saying “wtf? it’s impossible!” is likely in no small part due to how much customisation people have had to try and work with on it.
Obviously you get the odd genius who’s climbed the mountainous learning curve and has entered a Zen-like relationship with the software, but for the rest of us, we’re never going to get all those hours, days, or weeks of our lives back. Some of us have been reduced to 3am tears trying to get Magento to do unreasonably simple things like a single column layout. I can look back on it and laugh now, but I’ll damned if anybody’s gonna get me to work on it again :D
Daniel
May 6th, 2009 8:35 am@PG & circus: I lost around a month’s work trying to set up a shop, and in the end I had to cut my losses and program one myself. If I had known before how awful Magento is, I would have my month back. The fact that Magento is free doesn’t make me any less resentful.
@Ryan: Your comment was trolling at best, and downright racist at worst. I’m suprised no one has called you out on it yet. Please try to be a bit more constructive in the future. And learn some spelling.
Vin Carrillo
May 6th, 2009 8:41 amNot sure how qualified in Web development any of the folks promoting Magento are, or how profitable your company is at selling white labeled versions of this platform to clients. We generate several thousand dollars monthly using CS-Cart, and with its simple PHP/Smarty framework it is a breeze to install, template and configure. Additionally and most importantly we have never had a client complain about back-end (admin) navigation or category and product population. In fact we generally spend less than an hour on the phone, and the client just gets it.
On the other hand, we as a team effort, tried to manipulate Magento just two weeks ago and what a mess. The install size is at least three times larger than CS-Cart, we had to make some pretty exotic changes to our server environment, it took the three of us almost an hour to properly generate a CMS page, and another hour to create a product page. Excuse me, but WTF over? Why does a company charge almost 2 bills for a template – I would too if it took me days to create it!
As noted within several comments, although Magento is an ‘open-source’ framework, it is absolutely the worst implementation of an ecommerce platform for anyone needing to generate revenue by selling it for client use. If your company has a dedicated IT staff willing to spend hours on the phone or on-site to tutor every aspect of implementing Magento, great! In fact this would be a really nice way to force your clients to pay some form of maintenance fee – they will need to call each time changes need to be made to their Web site. However if you want your clients to recommend you/your company to friends (aka word of mouth), switch to any of the other lighter platforms. May cost a couple hundred up-front but at least with CS-Cart, it rewards handsomely with free upgrades and some nice support if ever needed. Hell, I would even use Interspire’s shopping cart product, although costly, much easier to implement and configure than Magento.
Don’t want to believe any of the negative post here? Just check the Magento forums and read all the disparaging and discouraging topics by individuals desperately trying to get this crap to work on their server. Why would anyone create such a difficult product is beyond comprehension unless they had an ulterior motive. Hey, maybe we can sell a Super Enterprise version with support included for say about $9000!
Sean
May 6th, 2009 8:45 amPhew, this conversation is hard to watch! Looks like some so-called developer(s) feels threattened by Magento. It’s just a bit of software, dude. You’ll be okay!
Sylvia
May 6th, 2009 9:51 amThe designs are just templats and may be modified, what Magento is really concered with are the e-commerce aspects and in this sense, Magento is a real success!
Daniel Kerr
May 6th, 2009 10:19 amI don’t mind saying something is good if its good. Magento is not good.
osCommerce: It was Good, but now despertly needs updating with a better engine.
Wordpress: Good
Joomla: Good
OpenCart: Good
Pestashop: Good
Magneto: Terrible to code with. Buggy as hell. It Actually has so much bloat it takes a few seconds on each request. The coding is all over the place it may never be bug free. etc..
5ink
May 6th, 2009 10:29 amYou know something is wrong when you unzip it and it’s 60 megs for the app. Great concept, best out there feature wise. If it was faster and lighter it would be great. I think they need to go back and refactor a lot of the code
Jason Barone
May 6th, 2009 10:53 amI’ve played with Zen, os, Uber and Magento. Magento had the slickest interface of them all, however I found it very difficult to do everything. The template system was such a pain, most people won’t even figure out how to swap out a logo easily. The documentation was extremely bad and it’s difficult to find information. And It seemed rather bloated to me. I ended up deleting it after 3 days of playing with it.
I haven’t tried Ubercart of eCommerce for Drupal on Drupal 6 yet, I’ll have to give that a shot.
Scott
May 6th, 2009 1:00 pmMost of those themes have absolutely terrible code. A lot of them are from companies that outsource to some pretty flaky coders, foreigners. But then again, they all tend to build off the existing poorly built default themes.
Magento is buggy and uses many poor coding practices, but heck.. few systems I’ve used are any better. Prestashop is crummy. Volution is horrible. Shopify has outrageous fees and a non-customizable checkout design. Xcart and Litecommerce are Russian and they have backdoor access to any account, and LC isn’t 100% open source. I wouldn’t be able to do a justice on how terrible OSCommerce and its offshoots are. Then there are some really complex, really expensive systems that probably aren’t much better. Intershop is supposed to be decent, but I haven’t forked out the dough for a license yet. Cubecart and CS cart are making progress, but design is still a bit too much work (kinda like Magento). Haven’t used Joomla, or a WP implementation, but from what I’ve seen they can be a bit of work to customize with new core enhancements and alternate functionality (something that is fairly decent to do with Magento, after you get past the bottlenecks and limitations it does put forth), so not sure how those CMS based implementations do on larger scale sites (but then M is bloated and has performance issues, and it’s its own system). Magento is slick looking, but beauty is only skin-deep. If you know any decent standards, you’ll see the default themes fall apart in the lack of quality frontend code (Come on, inline javascript? Where did Minu learn to code?), let alone the core, which has too much HTML locked into it. Did I mention it’s too heavily reliant on JavaScript? And no, I’m not talking AJAX… There’s what… three areas of Magento that take advantage of that functionality, yet they laughably claim Magento is the Web 2.0 cart. What a way to run a Fortune 500 website or three!! Weee!
Support for Magento is few and far between, and documentation is the worst. Plus, Roy Rubin has an ego the size of the Hindenburg. He’s definitely got some ecommerce blinders on. Trust me, I met him in person a year ago… he wasn’t any different than he is now. He’s just busier (busy looking for more Fortune 500 companies, not planning improvements that matter most to its user base, of course).
But heck, I’ve been using Magento since day one and was a partner for the past year, while I watched expectations of improvement in support and quality fail to come to fruition (I knew that was going to happen though). It’s interesting to watch it all go down… kinda like the Hindenburg did (a forshadowing of things to come?).
Ah, but I’ve stuck with M because it brings in some high-paying clients… plus I continue to find new flaws and usability issues all the time, and there’s nothing better to aid in the planning and development of a new ecommerce system that whomps them all. Just you wait and see. ;)
Oh, and don’t try to fork Magento. All you’ll end up doing is moving stuff around, like putting the M after the o… stuff that I don’t think Agent K would approve of, though you might be able to trick Agent J into thinking it’s the new hotness. But alas, it’s still old and busted on the inside. Admit it Agent Om… you can’t handle the truth! It’s hopeless… for now. {grin}
FYI, I’ve worked on approximately 18 Magento projects since its release last spring. If that helps you see the bugger… I mean bigger picture. ;)
jos
May 6th, 2009 1:05 pmScott, Amen brotha!
Foxman
May 6th, 2009 1:12 pmI installed magento on a shared host no problem.
I have played with it a bit and all seems ok thus far…..(famous last words) I do like the interface of the admin which is appealing to my clients.
Iam not sure what all the fuss is about sounds like designers are pissed cause it isn’t easy and programmers are pissed cause it’s not the way they would have done it…
Other just hate the designs post here (me being one of them …although hellothemes does a decent job…no affiliation)
Please provide a link to your open source feature rich shopping cart…..ahh wait you can’t…”computer says no”
I am by no means a magento fan I have used plenty of carts and few have the features. I will take the difficulty of installation and design if I can offer my clients all of these features newsletters, cms,,,and much much more….
Come on people we hate haters..give constructive feed back so smashing can learn about posting what we want and magento can address their issues…”open source matters”
Roy
May 6th, 2009 1:14 pmWe’ve been designing Magento themes, developing Magento extensions (payment-gateways, freight-modules, affiliate-system, etc) for almost two years now and I can for sure understand all the “anger” many of you have who’we had a bad experience with working on these topics in Magento, as its indeed very hard to get started.
However, I can tell from our experience that if you really but your effords into getting to know Magento’s concept you’ll manage to handle these topics quite easily, and by the time even much better than most other ecommerce platforms out there. Trust me.
Just my five cents to all of you.
Brian Temecula
May 6th, 2009 2:40 pmWow, SM is really stepping outside the box doing something other than WordPress templates. Thank you!
waye
May 6th, 2009 4:34 pmMangento is very slow shopping cart system. I will never want to use it again! then I change to use opencart which is a lot better than Mangento!! at least I can do anything I want in my shop!
Timothy Harden
May 6th, 2009 9:53 pmMagento templates really are a nightmare. We use Interspire’s shopping cart and it takes about 2 hours to integrate a template, so a lot quicker. We’ve worked with Magento, X-Cart, OsCommerce, but Interspire is the winner for us. What prompted this write up of Magento anyway? Seems like a marketing ploy disguised as a blog about free templates. FYI Interspire ship with over 50 free (and much better quality) templates out of the box.
CSS Luxury
May 6th, 2009 10:39 pmMagento is indeed a very complex ecommerce solution, but i used it only to find some inspiration for developing a custom one. I really dont use any open source frameworks, all of them has the code messed up.
GereZs
May 6th, 2009 11:15 pmThis is a post with worthy comments on a strong debate.
We are also developing a small webshop with Magento and I can tell that this is a pretty slick but complex system with it’s strange/new templating system. Takes a LOT of time to learn, although best interface all around.
Thanks for all the real-life experiences from readers! (The comment about Russian coders tickles my mind anyway…)
Fabio
May 7th, 2009 4:01 amMagento is slow, buggy, template hell and has the worst updgrade system ever.
It is clear build in this way to force users to buy support from the company.
There´s no other logical reason as why a team that has the capacity to come up and to build a system with such good ideas like one page checkout, an great admin section, etc, manages to mess up the code so bad.
Unless of course they intended to do it.
David
May 7th, 2009 5:42 am@Fabio – Magento is slow, buggy, template hell and has the worst updgrade system ever.
We already know that, but one million question is, what is the best alternative?
Show me some decent payable e-commerce software? Show me…
Fabio
May 7th, 2009 6:15 am@David,
Just because your question is unanswered , that doens´t mean you should use Magento.
There are other carts out there, they all have problems as well, but I´m sure you will loose less sleep over them than with Magento ;P
David
May 7th, 2009 6:44 am@Fabio,
yes I know that, now I’am looking a decent e-commerce and I can’t find it, so I need some help here.
Maybe the best alternative is Interspire.
I think Magento will soon fall down, it just a matter of time. They have great marketing, but even a great promotion can’t save a poor coding ;)
David
May 7th, 2009 4:01 pmThis is a really bad selection of themes, between 3-4 theme developers. There are much better themes for Magento, I am astonished that some really good themes have been left out. This looks like an ad of three theme developers, not expected from SM
fall3n
May 7th, 2009 5:22 pmInteresting mixed comments, some love it others hate it. I personally think it could be good, but it’s not easy to integrate your own designs, it’s buggy as hell, and the update process never works. I tried it, but for now I will definitely have to pass. I’ve been looking at Interspires Shopping Cart. Their corporate version is a quarter of the price and it looks to be pretty solid. They’ve been a software developer for over 5 years now. I’m just diving into it now, but I can provide a better review in a few weeks should anyone be interested.
storm
May 7th, 2009 6:23 pmA couple of years ago I was looking at lots of free e-commerce systems, and actually found cubecart to be the best (features, customisation). None of the carts were very easy to customise at the time, but CC was the one I chose to go with at the time. Magento was looking interesting until I read all the horror stories of how hard it is to work with. Will check out the other ones mentioned and get back up to date with e-commerce.
Cheers SM for this, it’s stimulated alot of discussion. I can see a full head-to-head article in the near future :)
dv_grrl
May 7th, 2009 9:08 pmI have a few years experience building e-commerce sites, tried lots and was EXTREMELY disappointed with Magento. I’ve been going back after each update in case they worked out the bugs, but it still sucks. The code was horrible to decipher, the number of files to customize was obscene, and it was so bloated it took 7 minutes to upload one, yes ONE, product. Stay far far away from it.
prtech
May 7th, 2009 11:15 pmI’ve been using Magento for a couple of stores. After I set up my first, the second one was pretty easy. To the people saying they took an hour setting up the product page and so on, that’s ridicolous! Magento is a great cart system and by far the most professional.
I found a theme on themespond.com called Nice Price which looks pretty good and will be creating yet another store on Magento with it.
Adam
May 8th, 2009 1:24 amI was contemplating looking into Magento as we currently do most of our websites using wordpress and this seemed like a logical step for shopping websites. But I must say, now I’m completely confused by everyones responses.
It seems 3 or 4 people slate it, then another 2 say they like it but steep learning curve and these slaters just haven’t bothered to learn the platform enough and then 2 say it’s the best thing since slice bread and another 4 slate it again?
I first heard about it by the wordpress guru Joost de Valk whom I like and respect so If he’s getting stuck in maybe I shouldn’t listen to the haters??? http://yoast.com/guide-to-magento-seo/
I’m a designer so maybe a should hold off for a while, to see if it can develope into a more user friendly solution? I guess I’ll look to download it anyways and probably waste 3-4 days!
David
May 8th, 2009 2:43 am@prtech
…you don’t know what are talking, installing template is easy, but make your own template/desing is pain the ass, and with each upgrade you must update your template too.
Sky
May 8th, 2009 3:46 amAfter reading this entire thread it’s very obvious that there is a handful of users, posting multiple times as other people, sometimes to promote their own product (e.g. opencart).
[This is obvious from the syntax used, common grammar mistakes, etc, when you take a whole overview of all comments]
Magneto in my experience can be frustrating initially, especially if you’re not a developer, which is probably where most of the posted resentment comes from – but it is easily the most powerful (free) solution out there.
The initial size is large, but so is the Magneto’s functionality – just make sure you use a *good* FTP client that doesn’t take forever between file transfers (e.g. FireFTP sucks for this).
Or use SimpleScripts.
I will say though, that skinning Magneto isn’t fun – it would be fantastic if it were as easy as a WP installation, but it’s not.
Nightfly
May 8th, 2009 4:15 amMagento does most of what I need and is flexible enough to allow for the rest.
Complains about complexity are valid, but it’s just the way it is. If you can’t or don’t want to deal with it, don’t blame the system.
I “do this for a living” and enjoy it.
quirkybird
May 8th, 2009 8:55 amWe’ve been using Magento for about 6 months and won’t use another shopping cart system.
From a feature standpoint, out of the box and including all of the free extensions out there, it’s head and shoulders above any other system we’ve used (and we’ve used over a dozen)…even on it’s worst day.
We run our own server. You’ll need to optimize your server for it to run quickly. All of ours run super fast. I would not suggest using shared hosting for this system.
The design curve, as mentioned above, IS super steep. There are a trillion files and the directory structure depth is staggering. Once you get the hang of it, it’s about 8 hours of work to theme from a PSD…for us at least. Our designs are graphic heavy though, more simple, primarily css based designs would probably move much more quickly. Here are a few:
em tanner
lisa leonard
fat tie
our own website
Our clients love this system. It does have bugs, but most have pretty simple fixes that can be found through the forum, it’s just a matter of finding them. Like I said, even on it’s worst day, it’s head and shoulders above the rest. We don’t even consider OS, joomla, or Zen viable shopping cart options. Their functionality and code is unintuitive and, frankly, just plain janky.
viva la magento!
PS: david…make sure you’re not putting your template in the core directory. This is overwritten every time you upgrade.
Duaine Hechler
May 10th, 2009 2:54 amMagento looks great on the surface. BUT …….
I installed it for my business shopping cart and all went well until ….
- FIrst thing I found out was that an upgrade will wipe out all your changes to the default theme and reload back to the DEMO store. For a SIMPLE workaround, you have to copy the default theme and call it something different and customize and use it.
- Tried to update to the latest 1.3.1 – broke everything – could not even get to the admin logon screen. Plus had a hell of a time getting back to the previous version and getting stable
- There common fix is to run a pear script in an SSH shell environment – my host will not left me do that – security risk
- As well as running the PHP command popen() to download and install magento connect modules – had to sweet talk my host into turning that on
- I tried to copy it to my desktop (localhost) – after many days, I finally got it there, many things were broken, as well as too many manual changes to – hidden – files.
- Last but not least, it took almost 4 weeks to answer my forum posts
Started with OSCommerce, then Zen-Cart then Magento ..
Sticking with free, I’m migrating to Prestashop
Niels
May 10th, 2009 4:53 amHum, interesting conversation here…
All this reminds me a bit on typo3 in the very beginning. In the early days typo3 was slow as hell, too. Everyone who tried it for a few hours said that it was worst coded ever, too difficult to install, all that imageMagick and typoscript stuff was stupid, etc., etc. Within the last few years it developed quite nice, all the code got better in structure, and a quite nice and friendly community got formed. i made sites with typo for 5 years and in the beginning it was hard to get into it, too.
so i will just wait and see where it all goes with magento…
dav
May 12th, 2009 10:27 amso good!
thanks
ET
May 13th, 2009 10:21 amI quit a good-paying job with great benefits and reasonably intelligent coworkers because I was told I’d be working with Magento again.
As a (mostly web) programmer with 10 years of programming experience and 8 years with PHP, I can tell you that Magento is horribly designed, terribly executed and impossible to extend, never mind the disgusting list of bugs and impossible ‘upgrade’ procedure.
Magento was written to cash in on open source: It’s an impossibly, unnecessarily complicated labyrinth of inheritance; it’s undocumented and the staff are unresponsive to the community. The only possible reason for this software to exist is as a vehicle for support sales. The software will not handle any reasonable number of connections, it makes absolutely no attempt to spare your database (go read up on EAV and see how frighteningly awful Magento’s use of it is — then go track database queries and see how many HUNDRED each page load makes).
I don’t know how the hell this article found its way into my feed reader; I didn’t think I’d subscribed to something that would support something so horrendous.
john
May 16th, 2009 7:13 am@ET. No offense man, you don’t sound too intelligent yourself. With so many years of php, you can’t figure it out?
Are you 15 years old like the rest of the idiots here?
brian
May 17th, 2009 4:25 pmYep. I am officially confused on this post. I am / was very close in choosing Magento to start a shopping cart.
Was going to host with simplehelix.com and use a theme from hellothemes.com as my solution. Anyone have any feedback on these?
Daniel Kerr
May 25th, 2009 3:34 amI just found this slide show presentation on the poor coding of magento.
http://www.priebsch.de/2009/03/had-a-look-at-the-magento-source-code-yet/
its funny. the people who coded it are just cowboys.
LC
May 25th, 2009 7:55 amI was on the process to start a small e-commerce site and wanted to try out Magento. All the negative comments led me to test Prestashop and while it’s somewhat ok (and French wouhou!), it could not do some simple things I needed.
So I tried Magento and I am playing with it for some days now and I must say that the backend is really impressive. I won’t say it’s well coded (I don’t plan to hack it …) and it is a bit slow (not that much) but it’s really well thought and usable.
On the frontend side I can’t say much right now but all the comments here scared me ;)
theWebXpert
May 28th, 2009 12:54 amwow…this is the most long thread ever for magento themes..
Totally agreed with some as we are one of the pioneering for magento cart system.
in fact, i do agree with many of them who claims magento is hard to code for the front end.
there was once instant where we have fix a bug throughout the 15,000 files…dig all the way in for a week. but its great experience.
now i think Magento is far the best of the best, on top of all other carts with its features available!
see some sites we did recently, its all good. no drama.
http://www.naturenu.sg
http://www.candleflo.com
http://www.boutiquenextdoor.com.au
http://www.iwantiwantiwant.com.au
unnamed
May 28th, 2009 10:53 pmi dont know what the big deal is with you people hating on magento
its not hard, i have little OOP yet i am fully capable of customizing magento to my needs and i am now developing a mega-e-store for a company that i started working for almost a month ago. keep in mind i have no prior experience with any e-commerce CMS and i just learned as i went along. magento is fine, stop being so stuck up because the internet is changing. its people like you that stick to the same thing and will cause the web 2.0 bubble to pop and history repeats itself once again.
Francis
May 31st, 2009 7:27 pmMagento is the best e-commerce Open Source Plateform.
Some people seem to be frustrated about code and design architecture because Magento is built on top of Zend Framework. If you familiar with procedural coding, i understand why some people « hate » Magento simply because they don’t know about MVC (Model , View and Controller) approach.
Magento is built on very strong and flexible structure. Take a look at Zend Framework to learn about it.
http://www.framework.zend.com
gdfg
June 7th, 2009 3:50 amExcellent article!
Donny
June 9th, 2009 8:13 pmI’ve worked with 3 top opensource carts, osCommerce, Zen cart, and Magento. Although I’m still new to Magento, but I really think the developer should really need to path way to much better coding and system. This script is way slow than the two carts. Also upgrade is nothing but the pain in the ass. But the good things, it has excellent design/graphics, and more complete in-built features.
I still prefer Zen cart for few reasons:
- Much better coding, easy to understand, easy to modify, flexible.
- modules are easy to port to higher version.
- Upgrade is easy, even non technical user can upgrade it.
- Stable, running fast, but a little issue in database queries, lot of queries though
- I’ve tested on a client stores with 6000-20000 products and keep adding, with thousand of customers, very big shops, and ZERO bug so far. I mean it.
- Public Forum support is enormous! You can get response within minutes, no kidding.
But he weakness of Zencart
- New release tend to be late recently
- Poor default design/graphic, it is like having a car with GTR engine on Mini’s body. most likely new user will have to buy a template.
- Developer a bit kind of conventional, not like varien which is so aggressive to make market and dare to put new inventions.
I predict, in the future, Zen-Cart and Magento will stays at the top, it is depend on the developer of each script to overcome their weakness, and to make our life easier.
Lesya
June 11th, 2009 5:23 amGreat article but the comments are even better lol There would always be people who are comfortable with some shopping cart and the ones who are not. For those who are not comfortable with magento – you can always switch to different shopping cart. Now it’s even easier – you can try professional service cart2cart. It automates data transfer, offers assisted mi8gration, etc (http://www.shopping-cart-migration.com)
Dainis Valtas
June 13th, 2009 6:26 amAs web designer and developer I like Magento. After reading the fine manual for designers (do you remember? RTFM?) I have no problems with translating my psd files in to Magento skins, templates or interfaces. Just my 2 cents :).
Mike
June 24th, 2009 11:24 amDear, a question please.
I have to enable popen or not into my phpini?
Thanks
Cam
July 11th, 2009 9:20 amWOW! I was looking around for a more robust cart solution (i like wordpress but i know its limitations) and magento (i call it magneto too!) came up. And it LOOKS great and backend is nice but didn’t really crack open the hood yet. I am a wordpress guy learning drupal (UGGGGH but i am starting to like it) so learning ANOTHER platform would not be a stretch. either way, great post/comments thread. Brought up good points as well cautions.
Alistair Stead
July 31st, 2009 1:06 pmI have compiled a list of sources for further Magento information and tutorials for people interested in building their own themes. The first on the list is an explanation of how Magento works for WordPress and Drupal users.
This is by no means extensive but the sites listed include lots of helpful Magento content and tutorials.
http://www.designdisclosure.com/2009/07/how-to-magento-ecommerce-tutorials/
Alistair
www.emedia-group.eu
August 12th, 2009 4:56 amMagento is the best !
PLR MART
October 5th, 2009 10:34 amHi all,
i respect everyone’s comment here. But we must understand one thing like magento is not a simple application. have lot of features and people love this because of its pretty features and clean style. We love our products than others, its natural.
I am making a store for PLR products. I found some good and useful resources in online about magento and created the cart. tested, its fine.
I have gone through http://www.opencart.com demo also, its nice and simple. I have to check it up with an installation. Thanks to Daniel Kerr.
Coming to templates shown here, the post was made in may 2009, later many theme developers introduced new themes.
SM need to update this post. This post may give an idea to the beginners to choose where the themes available and some more useful information like your recommendations.
I welcome this post and i am happy to see you all.
librium
October 5th, 2009 11:38 amI kinda like Magento. I used ASP shopping carts before. Now I use PHP shopping carts. I always have a few shopping carts available and use them for my needs. If I need a simple site I use prestashop or OSCommerce, If I need complex sites like having 2 or more stores or domains I use magento. It is not easy, but nothing is easy now a days. I also use WordPress and Joomla. I even design modules and components for them. Believe nothing is easy if you don;t know how to code. But if you know how, everything is easy.
PLR Mart
October 12th, 2009 11:05 pmHi,
I have completed the website http://www.theplrmart.com .Please have a look and suggest me the best magento theme to suit for this website. Currently using hellotheme, but there is no after sales support.
SM can you please start a post on magento digital downloads themes that suit best
Regards
Venkat
Rahsaan
October 22nd, 2009 1:32 pmIf you look at some of the most popular and successful e-commerce sites (amazon, threadless, etc..) you tend to notice that the design isn’t really cutting edge, but the functionality is on point. These themes are nice, clear and are a good resource for designers to look at. I am working on a e-commerce site and while my design will be different, it is a good reference to start from.
Dan
October 23rd, 2009 1:29 pmWhy would you not just build a shopping cart yourself? e-comm is fairly straight forward, just build in the usability you like and improve when you have time.
Venkat
October 27th, 2009 12:07 amHi Daniel Kerr,
Is there any chance to switch from magento to opencart? i mean any solution.
I am with magento now and its have lot of values in it and need to make changes to the entire system. Hard to understand first.
But a good ecommerce solution it is i agree. But i have seen opencart, really simple and speed.
Magento some what slow. And i found many answers to fast the loading time is really not understandable.
Please let me know any solution available to convert from magento to opencart.
Venkat
Souika
November 9th, 2009 10:37 amAnother interesting e-commerce solution is Prestashop.
didi
November 9th, 2009 12:12 pmIt’s all good…
i just hate the upgrade system…
Chloe
January 25th, 2010 7:00 amGreat article. It’s amazing that free magento themes look so impressive!
and here is another list of free magento templates
http://www.design4magento.com/free-magento-themes/
Dave
February 10th, 2010 8:35 pmDave at CarbonFibre Gear!
I found you on Facebook months ago and loved your shop. I am really impressed with your shop.
Congratulations! We love the blog and everyone in the studio crowds around my computer screen when I shout “Mercedes in Carbon Fibre” or something similar.
Well done, keep up the good work and awesome line of products.
Kindest Regards,
PS. We LURVE Magento, with big sloppy kisses. Free templates are usually basic and the ones here are no exception. However there are some incredible design studios able to development on Magento to perfection:
http://www.e8creative.com are one such company.
Benetta
February 26th, 2010 12:25 pmI Liked it its really nice system and business for Singapore Ecommerce Software
ScreencastWorld
March 4th, 2010 1:47 pmI’ve created a more up to date list of Magento Themes and Templates over on ScreencastWorld.com. I’m endevouring to keep the list updated so it includes themes and templates for version 1.3 and 1.4. Enjoy.
bouncy castle hire in weston super mare
May 18th, 2010 3:11 amHaving used Magento and spent hundreds on pounds on coders and people to fix problems I am having I am still nowhere near the start of my online store. I am very depressed and unhappy with Magento (and the coder who recomeneded it!).
Thank you for the templates, but most of them only paritally work with the new Magento installation I am using …
Joe
May 22nd, 2010 7:42 amI recently moved from Magento to OpenCart, way much easier. Never coming bak to Magento. Look what you can do with OpenCart from a design point of view:
http://style.st/opencart-template-leonardo
Hope my experience helps someway
Metropolitica
May 27th, 2010 11:56 amDaniel, you’re obviously not a developer. I’ve built e-commerce/shopping-cart/inventory-management solutions for many clients, and besides from-scratch core-coded solutions, Magento is the first and only to work issue-free for the clients who we have implemented it for. It also takes redesign very well. The last project we did was for heartsafe.ca, which you can see has more than 30 products, and has worked flawlessly from day one. Plus, the client has come back for code modifications to customize the solution further (taxes, shipping, etc), for their needs, and those have also been implemented with no hiccups. We’ve done this for over 27 clients so far, and will continue to push Magento as the best available e-com/cart solution there is.
Need a Magento solution? metropolitica.com
Sandeep Goyal
August 6th, 2010 10:46 amwell.. I am very beginner to magento. Looking great at first glance.
PBCookie
August 8th, 2010 11:05 pmI don’t know if you all are just hating, reps from other shopping cart solutions, or what . .. but when I first looked into Magento, I read a lot of posts like these of people complaining about how slow it is, how hard it is to install, how limited it is, etc. etc. It almost scared me away from trying it. If I wasn’t the type of person who likes to see things for myself, I would have missed out on a piece of great software. I tried Volusion, CoreCommerce, Pinnacle Cart, Interspire, and WordPress eCommerce, and Magento was hands down the easiest to install. I didn’t have any of the issues and headache I had with any of the others. Volusion is money-hungry and overpriced, not too mention a purposely dreadful nightmare to customize so the they can rack up in design services. CoreCommerce and Pinnacle Cart have great features, but their templates suck, they have no premium ones for sale, and design starts in the $3000 price range. Interspire is great, but they have the same lack of design features as the CC and PC. WP eCommerce was great actually. But it was hard to install at first, and unless I’m wrong – WP eCommerce themes are very scarce. I literally installed Magento (after uploading the files) in less than 5 minutes. Refreshed my page, logged in, and was good to go asap. It has everything a small company could need to start up. And whatever it lacks there are plenty of free/paid extensions to add it. The support is awesome because it’s opensource, and you can usually find any info you need just by doing a google search. I know I did. It’s free, and already integrated with almost every payment gateway (including authorize.net FREE which some make you pay hundreds for) and to set it up all you have to do is enter your log in credentials in the back end. Not to mention, Magento has by far the BEST themes available for purchase, for a low cost, and most designers/developers don’t mind customizing them for you at no additional costs. You can also just put in an extension key for a blank Magento theme, and it will install it automatically and you can add your own PSD images/files to customize it for your own unique design. Hard?? I think not.d
I could go on and on, but it would take forever. All I can say is, if any of you are just trying to slander Magento out of jealousy or monetary gain . . . shame on you. You’re scaring away people from getting ahead for your own selfish reasons.
My site is still in progress, and the rules are no link dropping, otherwise, I’d post a link to my store.
For everyone else who reads this, try things for yourself and never ever ever just take someone’s word for it. Reviews are helpful, but it’s free to try so what would it hurt? If you are a small biz you can find good reliable hosting and install Magento simply and just use it as a starter package until your biz generates more income. At which point you’ll be able to afford moving it to whatever host/shopping cart solution you choose.
Best wishes!
PB Cookie ♥
Michel
August 21st, 2010 4:45 pmYo prefiero usar Prestashop o Joomla+VirtueMart antes que Magento.
Mitzico
September 5th, 2010 7:41 amKudos to Magento…. Its simplicity and openness makes my life easy… not to mention the flexibility and availability of themes and extensions. Thanks to the designers, developers and community who helps improve this powerful e-commerce technology. I am learning to love this product. cheers to all!!!
princess
September 9th, 2010 7:58 pmwow! it’s really nice list. Other highly recommended list of magento themes here mage-world.com/magento-themes/
Ashish @ Magento Themes
September 13th, 2010 9:52 pmWe typically create Magento themes for the community to download and use for free. It’s an honor for the theme developers to see their themes showcased in great sites like this. I hope this is a small encouragement from your part.
Mike
September 29th, 2010 8:21 amI m also moving to open-cart just transffered it stylomart com
David
October 6th, 2010 3:46 amThanks Dkumar for creating this list of premium and free Magento templates. Some of these comments don’t do Magento justice, just a little negative imo, with sprinkling of Magento scaremongering, especially about the speed.
I think many of those comments on speed expired a while back, Magento is really fast loading imo as lots of work has gone in optimising it, even on a shared hosting environment like Hostgator you can get page loads under a few seconds, which is good enough to test and even launch a low traffic store.
Installing Magento is simple to do over SSH!, I reckon you can have it installed and configured in under 10mins with core upgrades being installed in a snap with ‘Magento Connect’
Look I’ve been developing ecommerce sites for over 10 years, testing the majority of open source carts, the thing that really bugged me more than my girlfriend, was upgrading of the cart to the latest version, the templates were so woven with the cart upgrades it was a line by line nightmare to upgrade, my only saviour was my trusty diff app.
Now this is one area Magento has a perfect balance between the separation of the theme template and the core code, core system upgrades are installed through Magento Connect, leaving my template alone.
By using Magento’s…
- Improved caching system
- Installing a clean optimised template
- Configuring your .htaccess correctly a
- Using a CDN
- Installing Fooman Speedster extension
Your Magento store will have a rocket under its behind!
Here’s a good article which covers these speed hacks http://www.gxjansen.com/101-ways-to-speed-up-your-magento-e-commerce-website/
Before I get lost in my rant, I’ve another Free Magento Template ElectronikStore to add to your list, we’ve only just launched it. You can download it for free here http://www.magentothemedtemplates.com
For all the Magento skeptics out there you should check out our demo store, http://store.magentothemedtemplates.com for some solid evidence on how quick an Optimised Magento store will run on the cheapest shared box in could find! then make your mind up.
P.S. Magento development is getting speedier as the community are finding new tactics to develop, you’ve just got to read http://inchoo.net for superb Magento development articles.
Good stuff doesn’t come easy, you’ve got to work at it.
simon peter
October 11th, 2010 11:27 amhello friends very nice magento templates
i want to use one of these on my website samwebservices.com there i want to integrate it to sell web hosting, reseller hosting and seo services through my agents does anyone knows the best suitable template to sell these products/services.
Thank You
Ashish @ Magento Themes
October 13th, 2010 4:53 amThese are really cool themes but i don’t know whether these are compatible with Magento 1.4. Check out Magento 1.4 compatible themes here magentomagik.com/themes.html
Team Roster
October 29th, 2010 6:48 pmMaybe you should make changes to the blog subject 25 Magento Templates For Your E-Commerce Business – Smashing Magazine to more suited for your content you write. I liked the blog post yet.
Benetta
November 3rd, 2010 9:41 amSince launching magento commerce in March 2008, the Community Edition has seen a really rapid development path and todays stable version, 1.3.4.2, has a huge list of features all of which work straight out of the box. If the core features aren’t enough for you there’s over 1,700 extensions which can be installed via the Magento-Connect interface. Magento-Connect is integrated in to the backoffice (admin area) and allows you to quickly and easily install extensions with no fuss. For a full list of extensions see the Magento-Connect page. In a future episode we’ll cover this topic in greater detail.
Trinidad Gady
November 5th, 2010 11:28 amSeriously! Image looking google all night because of this and i also as a final point thought it was the following!
Michael
December 12th, 2010 11:18 pmLove Magento. Thanks for this list. Perhaps the only thing missing from it straight out-of-the-box is an ajax file uploader for the front-end for customers to upload files. But there’s always magento connect for this. That being said, I just found this post today: http://www.squarefootmagento.com/news/file-upload-progress-bar-magento.
Looks promising.
Sarah Jones
January 11th, 2011 10:31 pmThese templates are really wonderful and will sorely play a major role in one’s website success.
Thanks for sharing these information with us. I have sent this link to my designers for inspiration and to get some ideas.
Sam @ RocketTheme
January 31st, 2011 10:36 amNot really feeling any of these designs. Aside from the “Art & Photo Store”, everything still looks too much like Magento. Would like to see some more variation in the themes currently available. Magento’s definitely not the easiest system to work with, especially for designers, but once you get to grips with it you start to really see how well put together it is. We decided to make our own extensions for our templates in the end, as a sort of framework for helping cut down development time by having most of the options for the design configurable in the admin section. Definitely seems like the way to go.
Magento Wakefield
February 17th, 2011 4:00 pmHi great post some really high quality themes but if you want something free check this out http://www.instantshift.com/2010/09/09/50-high-quality-free-magento-themes/. If you need some help just give me a shout I regularly build Magento sites take a look at my portfolio http://www.fresh4design.com
catchcolors
March 11th, 2011 12:19 pmNice
Lester
March 24th, 2011 11:39 pmHello, thanks for sharing! There are some more free magento themes here http://web-experiment.info/free-magento-templates.html
Compatible with 1.4 – 1.5 magento
Aaansy Stone
July 4th, 2011 6:22 pmi would like to add a few more yet unique in this collection of free magento themes
http://magento-modules.blogspot.com/2011/05/top-5-free-magento-clothing-store.html
http://magento-modules.blogspot.com/2011/06/couple-of-free-magento-templates-for.html
Aden Smith
August 31st, 2011 2:50 amGreat round up, but I personally don’t believe in free templates. Their sloppy, all look the same (different color, but look like the demo) and in most cases are practically useless.
Clients have a vision, are excited and believe in their concept or product. You don’t want to sell them a poorly designed, half baked product, right?
Premium templates however, can be pretty useful. We’ve tried a few in the past, but they still require a lot of work and Magento knowledge. One of the best I’ve worked with is Simplestore from H&O. If you really want an original look and still want the advantages of using a template you should take a look at it.
Pudu
December 13th, 2011 10:52 amthese templates are really awesome. good work done! What do you think of pudu.com.au/
Mason
December 15th, 2011 6:22 pmRed theme of Magestore is also free and definitely not sloppy at all.