Varien a LA based Web firm turn ecommerce platform provider developed Magento, one of the most vibrant, feature rich open source ecommerce platform. Varien was founded in 2001 which worked with osCommerce. They originally planned to fork osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento. Though Magento version 1 publicly launched on March 31, 2008, the official development started way back in early 2007.
Magento is built on components of the Zend Framework. It’s available under the Open Software License version 3.0. Since version 1.1.7 some parts are licensed under the Academic Free License version 3.0. On April 15, 2009 Enterprise Edition, a paid for version of Magento is being introduced for large companies. This version provides a service agreement with Varien and starts at $11k+ USD/ year (It’s a shit load of money-well it’s definitely worth though).
So if you are counting evolution lifecycle Magento is just 2 years old, seriously underage compare to all those expensive horn blowing propriety ecommerce software. But guess what? It’s all the things anyone can expect from professional web stores. Honestly I’ve never seen another ecommerce platform well architected and well designed as Magento. It’s robust, simple to use/customize and dripping with features you can think of. The folks at Varien think of every bit of possible feature they can squeeze into that platform.
Key Features of Magento
Magento is loaded with every possible features you can dream of. It’s complete revolution in ecommerce system/platform.
- Layered / Faceted Navigation for filtering of products in Categories
- The ability to create, and manage multiple storefronts from one admin
- Multi-lingual, multi-currency support
- iPhone/mobile optimized
- One-Page Checkout
- Product comparison and reviews. Wish list support.
- Batch Import and Export of catalog
- Google Base integration
- Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.
- Multiple Images Per Product with zoom
- Shipping to multiple addresses in one order/Multiple shipments per order
- Feature-rich Customer Accounts with order tracking
- View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel.
- Integrated with a variety of major payment gateways out of the box, as well as alternative payment methods from PayPal, Amazon and Google. Check/money order, or purchase order and additional payment extensions are available through additional plugin.
- 100% Search Engine Friendly with integrated Google Site Map support
- Fully customizable design using templates
- Content Management System for Informational Pages
Drawbacks
Well Magento might be the near perfect platform for ecommerce and considered as model for the future ecommerce platform evolution but it still got some drawbacks that needs to be aware of.
- Resource intensive. Despite having built in cache management features, Standard Magento installation can be very resource hungry both in disk space and memory. Optimization required for cutting down resource usage and better performance.
- Magento system is complex for developers. It takes a new programmer a couple of weeks to get used to the system. Designers & developers need knowledge of PHP and XML, and a profound understanding of the Magento template system before they could create a design for the web shop.
- Magento asks a lot of the underlying hardware. To optimize things a bit the web server needs the APC (Advanced PHP Cache) module installed. But many shared hosting providers don’t have such a configuration. This makes Magento less usable to the shared hosting people. You need either a Magento-specialized hosting platform or a virtual dedicated server.
Finally those who are hardcore fan of Shopping cart software, note Magento is not a shopping cart system-it’s a full fledge ecommerce platform. Despite a bit resource hunger, Magento is an excellent ecommerce platform. Some users may find it too complicated, but I believe it is one of the top solutions for online retailers in the market today.
Recommended Resources
Here are some recommended resources that will give you more in depth idea on Magento, it’s growth, features and system requirements etc.
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