Magento is one of the fastest growing Ecommerce software solutions on the web. It is also Open Source – which results in Magento being free and haing a strong community behind it. Additionally, this offers more flexibility to users and developers alike. Open Source software is on the rise today with Mozilla Firefox a good example of the capabilities and achievements of Open Source software. Magento, is more or less, the best Open Source ecommerce solution out there and also one of the best ecommerce solutions due to its inherent flexibility, stability and a large number of features. Magento is also the most professional ecommerce solution – a fact that is not hampered but further boosted by its being free and open source. Some Facts: * $25 Billion in transactions * 60,000+ merchants * 2,000+ extensions * 2+ Million downloads Creator: * Magento Inc. * Varien Magento also has a Company, Varien, behind it. This company provides several commercial services and is responsible for the premium packages that include support – although the Magento Community Edition is free and as are the various Magento extensions. This review will discuss the Magento Community Edition – since this is the one that is free to download. For value added services and support, the Magento Enterprise Edition is recommended. This is mostly used by companies. Magento also prides itself as the creator of the world’s first Mobile eCommerce platform. Magento Community Edition allows a merchant to create stores with ease – in a simple click process. Advanced and customized stores can be created without having to modify or change the underlying code. These changes take place in a few minutes. Magento also has a fine tuned permissions system. It has permissions sets for various users. The Administrator of Magento can assign users to several groups. Examples of such groups are Full Admin, Customer Service and Warehouse employees. This is done through a permission editor which the controls access allowed to each employee. Such a feature is rare in ecommerce software and is implemented to its fullest in Magento. Magento is also Search Engine friendly through a number of crucial features. It also allows a merchant to manage multiple websites from one Magento installation. This is useful for a company that produces different types of products or is situated in different countries. Furthermore, Magento has the ability to create a large number of reports on various aspects. This includes Sales, Wishlists, Reviews and Tags. Here is a list of some important features as stated on the Magento website. Some Magento Features Marketing Promotions and Tools * Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. * Catalog Promotional Pricing Analytics and Reporting * Admin Dashboard for Report Overview * Abandoned Shopping Cart Report * Best Customers Report by Total and Number of Orders Search Engine Optimization * Google Site Map * URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s * Meta-information for products and categories Site Management * Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel * Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and any third-party application * A/B and Multivariate Testing Catalog Management * Batch Import and Export of catalog * Google Base Integration * Downloadable/Digital Products * Advanced Pricing Rules and support for Special Prices (see marketing tools) Product Browsing * Multiple Images Per Product * Product Image Zoom-in Capability Checkout * One-Page Checkout * Checkout without account/Guest Checkout * Shipping to multiple addresses in one order Payment * Multiple Payment Options Supported * Payment Extensions Available through Magento Connect * Configurable authorization and capturing of funds Customer Service * Feature-rich Customer Accounts * Order Tracking from Account Customer Accounts * Re-orders from account * Downloadable Products * Recently ordered items Order Management * View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel. * Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment. Some Notable Magento Extensions * Featured Products * AJAX Cart Pro * Advanced Menu * Video Module * Z-Blocks * Search Autocomplete… * Booking and Reservations * On Sale * Facebook Link List of Some Notable Magento Clients * 3M * Lenovo * Samsung * Myla * Espresso * Vizio * The North Face * Watco Magento System Requirements * PHP 5.2.0 or newer, with the following extensions/addons: * PDO/MySQL * MySQLi * mcrypt * mhash * simplexml * DOM * MySQL 4.1.20 or newer * Apache Web Server (1.x or 2.x) * A Sendmail-compatible Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) – Magento will connect directly to an SMTP server if you don’t have an MTA Get Magento from HERE
Beautiful post with nice informational content. This is a really interesting and informative post. Good job!
Well done mate.. very interesting post. Nowadays the majority of webmasters prefer to use magento commerce shopping cart software for running their ecommerce web sites..
magento is good option, but did you ever tried other softwares like AbleCommerce or BigCommerce...I think they also have good reputation. What you say?
So true, thanks for the share. Magento is always a good choice it's feature rich, flexible, scalable and robust best for any store functionality you want.