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Magento Commerce for your e-store
Are you aware that e-commerce sales will double, by 2012? If you are, will you be part of the lucky ones benefiting from it or will your business model be wiped out, by it?
Any smart merchant wants to be on the winning side but in the not-so-distant past, it’s been a bit hard to establish a credible e-commerce storefront since money, complexity and a general lack of flexibility were major issues.
Many prospective online merchants started with PayPal and had some level of success with it but the venerable service is, for all useful purposes, limited to the payment processing so it’s not a full blown e-commerce store. Then came the tryout of OSCommerce, the open source pioneer to establish a PHP & MySQL-based online store. It’s free, functional, extensible and can be dressed up very nicely but nevertheless, there seems to be missing a little something.
Meet Magento Commerce.
By all means, this is a surprising open source, PHP & MySQL, script — it looks like a million bucks with pull-down menus and all, offers an extensive number of core features and is supported by a huge community of e-commerce experts and fans.
This open source project has been evolving under the radar for many merchants and some are just discovering it and without any surprise, adopting it.
Here’s a short overview of what you can expect from Magento Commerce:
- Analytics and reporting
- Integrated with Google Analytics
- Admin dashboard for report overview
- RSS feed for new order
- Tax reporting
- Catalog browsing
- Layered / faceted navigation for filtering of products
- Product comparisons
- Product reviews
- Popular search terms cloud
- Catalog management
- Inventory management with backordered items, minimum and maximum quantities
- Batch import and export of catalog
- Advanced pricing rules and support for special prices
- Search results rewrites and redirects
- RSS feed for low inventory alerts
- Product browsing
- Multiple images per product
- Product image zoom-in capability
- Multi-tier pricing upsell
- Add to wishlist
- Send to a friend with email
- Customer accounts
- Order status and history
- Re-orders from account
- Recently ordered items
- Newsletter subscription management
- Amazingly complete account dashboard
- Customer service
- Contact Us form
- Feature-rich customer accounts
- Customizable order emails
- Create and edit orders from the admin panel
- Order management
- View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel
- Print invoices and packing slips
- Create re-orders for customers from administration panel
- Shipping
- Integrated for real-time shipping rates from UPS, UPS XML (account rates), FedEx (account rates), USPS and DHL
- Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
- On-site order tracking from customer accounts
- Table rates for weight and destination
- Table rates for product sub-totals and destination
- Table rates for number of items and destination
- Checkout
- One-page checkout
- SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
- Option to create account at beginning of checkout
- Accept gift messages per order and per item
- Saved Shopping Carts with configurable expiration time
- Payment
- Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
- Integrated with multiple PayPal gateways
- Saved Credit Card method for offline payments
- Accept Checks/Money Orders
- Accept Purchase Orders
- Search engine optimization
- 100% Search Engine Friendly
- Google Site Map
- URL Rewrites give full control of URL’s
- Meta-information for products and categories
- Auto-generated popular search terms page
- International support
- Multi-lingual
- Support for multiple currencies
- Tax rate support
- Localization
- Marketing promotion and tools
- Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products and categories
- Catalog promotional pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories and products
- Landing page tool for campaigns
- Up-sells in shopping cart
- Cross-sells on product pages
- Polls and newsletter management
- Site management
- Control multiple websites and stores from one administration panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
- Administration permission system roles and users
- One-click upgrades
- Content management system (CMS) for informational pages
Impressive, right?
In the unlikely event this isn’t enough to convince you Magento Commerce is ready to propel even the smallest shops into the big leagues, take their demo store for a spin and see for yourself how professional it all looks.
The current roadmap has a lot more “in store” for you, though. How about banner management, bundles, gift registries, customer balances, RMA support, full support for backorders, cost management, warranties, subscription management, required items, recommended items, gift wrap option, limited catalog access per user group, membership management and further performance enhacements? Well, that’s all being phased into the upcoming versions of Magento Commerce so with the one-click upgrade process, the online merchants using this open source script to sell their products and / or services will effortlessly be up-to-speed with the finest e-commerce sites out there.
Wether you plan to sell just a few things or a whole boat load of them, Magento Commerce should be one of the scripted alternatives you evaluate. Be ready to work hard setting up your e-shop but in the end, if you work your magic right, the final result for your customers should help you ring lots of sales.
Tags: magento, magento commerce, e-commerce, e-sales, e-store, e-shop, online shop, online store, paypal, oscommerce, php commerce, mysql commerce, merchants, web store, web storefronts
2 Responses to “Magento Commerce for your e-store”
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[...] larger setups might swing towards the very impressive Magento Commerce web script, which is also open source and based on PHP and MySQL but for anything akin to a small [...]
When running a business, the first thing you should do is always establish a good customer service.