I want to tell you about the Magento Ecommerce Platform, an open source ecommerce software for professionally managing an online store.
Before today I had never even heard of Magento, but man, Magento looks like some sweet software for ecommerce web site owners or wannabees.
First thing that caught my eye was that Magento is open source & free to use. Secondly, Magento is capable of managing multiple online stores from a single install.
The Magento site claims that "Magento is the fastest growing eCommerce platform on the market." And they have a showcase on their web site that lets you see real live sites that are using Magento.
For instance, there's HoMedics. Yeah, it's those people that make relaxing stuff. Looking around the HoMedics site will give you the idea of what kind of a professional and well polished system Magento is.
Yves Rocher is a botanical beauty care products site from France that is using Magento to power their online presentation and sales. It looks like they have a pretty slick designer too!
Check out Myla, a retailer of lingerie and body products, for their fine implementation of Magento.
Those are three sites you can look at to get a better idea of what Magento can do. Magento also has a live demo of Magento available for you to explore.
I'm impressed by the clean layout of Magento's backend administration area.
Immediately upon logging in, I was taken to the Dashboard of the Magento Admin Panel where a glance of statistics can be had. This dashbord gives a quick view of things like:
The Dashboard has a very clean feel. And remember since Magento is capable of managing multiple stores, the dashboard can be used to view data for any single store or totals for all stores.
I noticed that Magento has a built in CMS, you a user can manage the non-store pages of their site (e.g. About Us, Customer Service.)
Pretty cool.
All in all, this Magento system looks pretty well thought out. I guess this is what might be called a turn key ecommerce solution. Just add hosting, a payment processor, and of course some products.
I'm so totally going to set up Magento tonight.
I mentioned the CMS component of Magento. That is fabulous. And in addition the CMS part of Magento, Magento also has:
The above is just a list that I compiled from the main backend menu items. There's even more types of functions than that when considered that many of the menu items listed above have submenu items that I didn't list.
Also consider that Magento has a very active development team and that Magento is extendable with many useful extensions available.
Well I told you my first impressions of Magento. You can probably just go ahead and log into the Magento demo site to get a feel for it on your own. Looks like tonight I'm going to install Magento and get a better idea of what it's capable of.
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