Magento – The New Standard in Open Source eCommerce
ECommerce Platform for Growth
Magento has only been around about 6 months now, but in that short time has vaulted to become the preferred choice for ecommerce development for many web designers working with Open Source solutions. What is the reason for this vast popularity and is it justified? The biggest factor is a combination of design improvements with an administration panel that includes everything you need to manage any kind of ecommerce site. Magento has the professional, Web 2.0 look many designers love, and it sets itself apart immediately from OScommerce, Zen Cart, and the other existing ecommerce systems with well laid out templates and easy set up of site sections for your catalog display. Magento offers a shopping cart with a large number of payment gateways integrated out of the box, product comparisons, tags, polls, internationalization support, advanced reports, analytics, and SEO optimized URLs. There is support for coupons, discount codes, catalog management, wishlists, cross-sells, and related items. You can create orders from the admin section for offline or call center sales, and managing shipping is easy with built in calculation for USPS, UPS, DHL, Fed Ex, and other delivery services. Magento will also automatically calculate sales tax on orders and supports multiple currencies on the same site.
User Accounts:
The user experience with Magento is what really distinguishes this ecommerce platform from other comparable software systems for ecommerce. The user account stores existing order information, shipping and billing information, as well as a user’s wishlist, recently viewed, and recently compared products. Users can submit reviews, edit and manage them from their account pages. They can also submit tags for products, subscribe to newsletters, and send recommendations and wishlists to friends. The closest approximation to the Magento user experience most people will recognize is amazon.com. With time and effort, web masters can build an online “shopping experience” for customers similar to Amazon, which is really quite amazing coming from an Open Source, freely available software.
Administration:
Magento will scale depending on the time and effort you put into the design and configuration. It uses a template system, so you can customize the layout and display of the site through CSS, using blocks to rearrange content as in most CMS platforms. There is a fair amount of information on site about building themes and layout design, as well as a growing developer community on the forums. The Magento admin section is optimized for product creation, catalog management, and order tracking. After setting up the payment gateways and display options, there are a lot of advanced reporting, tracking, and analytic functions to allow you to manage the sales and shipping. Set up discounts, seasonal sales, related product promotions, and cross-marketing across pages and site sections to keep the user experience dynamic. If by some chance the features that you need on site are not included in the core package, the PHP architecture allows for the easy creation of custom code to implement extensions for clients and businesses that require unique solutions.
Digital Downloads:
Another popular feature that has people flocking to Magento is the optimized support for ecommerce involving virtual products and digital downloads. For software sales, ebooks, and template sites, this makes Magento’s feature list highly attractive for online sales.
Development & Implementation:
Magento is rapidly developing a community that provides support and solutions. Some modules, themes, and extensions have been made available under an Open Source license, while others are being released for sale under a proprietary one. These innovations allow you to extend the core system in custom ways, import data from other platforms, create mobile & iPhone friendly sites, and much more. You can also use Subversion for keeping your site up to date with security releases and upgrades.
Magento is recommended for new ecommerce sites and the remodeling of old ones, but expect OScommerce and other ecommerce platforms to retool and offer new features in an attempt to bring users back soon. For designers and developers, Magento is one of the best choices if you need another Open Source platform to add to the toolbox, and is the most professional of all the ecommerce packages available on the web today.
Check out the full feature list for Magento or try the online demo for Magento.
Interested in having a site developed using Magento? Support this site by using Xavisys for all your Magento development needs.
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16 Responses to “Magento – The New Standard in Open Source eCommerce”
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Magento is a really great application. They also have some video demos of the front and back end.
This is a cool post about shopping cart.
i need this for my site.
Thanks for such an informative post.
Caution to anyone considering Magento. It’s an extremely frustrating shopping cart to use and has some growing up to do. Beware!
@Nick – can you elaborate on this comment? What makes it frustrating and where do you suggest improvement?
Check out Prestashop its lighter than magento and so far better for me.
http://www.prestashop.com/
Here are some links that talk about Digital Downloads:
Can I sell Downloads with Magento ?
Digital Products Download
Digital Downloads for Magento?
Digital Download Products — really , when?
Digital Downloads
Digital Downloads/Virtual Products Multiple Files
Digital Downloads running in Magento
Digital downloads?
Can Magento do digital goods?
From what I've read so far,
1. Magneto wont run on your Localhost Development machine (develop site prior to upload to host).
2. Does not currently support Digital Downloads.
Is my understanding correct?
1. I had no problems installing and running it on my local machine.
2. Correct, but supposedly they should be available by the end of the year (in the next two months).
1. Magneto does NOT currently support Digital Downloads:
refer : http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewforum/1…
2. YES it will run on a local development PC as long as Apache,mySQL,php etc is installed and setup correctly.
eg http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/…
@all
Magento does have a groovy web2.0 looking interface and some clean coding, etc.. but, if you are talking about robust ecommerce you are also talking about integration.. ie.. quickbooks, peachtree, SAP, other accounting or ERP solutions.. and, a short visit to the forum at Magento will show you that 1) The core team is not developing such solutions 2) The community is trying to, to no avail, there are some core hacks laying around, etc.. but nothing that should be attempted on a site desiring to upgrade to the new features added later and 3) The users seemingly making some progress are asking for a 'donation' from 20 users.. for $1,00 EACH! NOTE: You can contact an IDN (Intuit Dev. Network) pro to build you a custom integration for less then that! 4) The other solution for such data sync is T-Hub – a fairly expensive – read $250 for a minimal version, $700 for what gets the job done – and the reviews of their support, which is PAID in addition to the program, is awful.
So, is Magento the 'best' solution for open source shopping carts.. maybe for some. But, for someone desiring to run a business, not just a cart… you may with to keep looking..
Just my 2 cents.
Peachtree users can now find an integration option (www.CartSpan.com) in MagentoConnect. CartSpan is a bi-directional interface that allows you to import your Magento orders into Peachtree and update your items prices & quantities-on-hand in the cart from the accounting system.
The product is not free but is priced very competitively relative to similar offerings in the market. Most importantly, it works as advertised and the return-on-investment is fast if you process more than a hand-full of orders per day.
@jeton: Prestashop is a nice software-tool for smaller shop but in my opinion it is not direct comparable to Magento. For starting your first eCommerce-Page with small budget, Prestashop could be an interesting alternative. For larger shops with more flexibility and scalablility is Magento highly recommendable…. But it´s more complex and more expensive to set up and run a Magento-Shop.
I will definitely be checking out Magento, looks like a great tool to add ecommerce to your site.
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I like the look of this, my skills with the open source element of programes like this is limited, but I know enought to appreciate guality when I see it!