Magento – Best for Open Source eCommerce?
Magento was only released last March, but already has been downloaded over 425,000 times. In that short time, Magento has become the preferred choice for ecommerce development for many web designers working with Open Source solutions. Why are so many flocking to Magento, and is the hype really justified by the functionality? We put Magento through a demo install and development process to test the software. Magento has the professional, Web 2.0 look many designers are looking for, and that is surely one of the main reasons for its popularity. In comparison to other ecommerce platforms like OScommerce, Zen Cart, etc. there is a definite improvement in both theme and display out of the box. Magento uses custom themes and block positioning like most popular CMS software for design. The templates are clean and dynamic, and it is easy to set up your catalog display. Magento includes a shopping cart, a large number of payment gateways, 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. The user account stores existing order information, shipping and billing addresses, 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 that I can site as an example is amazon.com, which is really quite amazing coming from an Open Source, freely available software. To see our full review of the Magento Ecommerce Platform, please visit webdevnews.net.
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February 25th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Magento..? right.
July 5th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Finally found the info I needed thanks to your great blog, thanks! ^^