About Magento

Magento is a powerful piece of open source e-commerce software that was created to enable online businesses carry out their online transactions. Thanks to its design and structure Magento has the capacity to provide online businesses with an opportunity for rapid growth and global trading. It is used by some of the biggest name brands and also has a premium, paid version that offers even more functionality and support should your online store really take off.

The history of Magento dates back to its official launch in March 2008, making it a relatively new player. Since then, this software has been gradually upgraded by the Magento community with the purpose of ensuring that it is able to meet the goals of the present dynamically changing e-commerce environment. o date, Magento has played an integral role in adding functionality and flexibility to online stores with many modules contributed by the community.

Why Magento?

Magento provides an integrated business platform that is instrumental to business owners and gives such online business owners control over their stores. As such, the software has been developed with some powerful features such as:

  • Administration Interface
  • Content Management Tools
  • Marketing Tools
  • Merchandising Tools

The features integrated in Magento not only empower the owners of online stores to control their business growth but to also create websites that are tailored according to their business needs. Any business having online dealings should know that this software is among the some of the Open Source software that provide the ultimate e-commerce solutions to businesses.

Magento was created with the sole purpose of meeting the emerging current needs of online traders. Here are some of the reasons as to why online businesses use Magento as their operational platform:

  • Magento provides online traders with a platform that enables them to gain control of their business activities and transactions. It gives them the power to stay on top of their businesses and as such, it has become famous among online business owners.
  • Magento does not place any constraints on the business processes and therefore provides a free trading environment. As such, a trader is able to diversify into many areas of trade without touch with his business activities.
  • Some people prefer Magento because it is not only professional but also free. However, there is the professional edition and other versions that are not free though they provide more enhanced features.
  • The software is also backed by a large support network consisting of Magento developers and users.
  • Magento has user friendly interfaces and great usability that makes it the preferable choice of an e-commerce solution. Magento is also tailored to suit any type of e-commerce operations and meet business owner’s needs.


Magento Advantages

Multilayered Support

The software is endowed with the capacity to provide the users with multiple layered usages and enables a single page checkout. As a result, its users are able to save time on making decisions on products through usage of drop down menus. As such, a user will get other layers ingrained together such that the prices, color, size and any product feature will be listed on a single page.

Product Price Comparison

With the Magento, a user is given the opportunity to carry out comparison in the prices of different products and make selections according to their best preferences.

Multiple Shipping Addresses

Magento gives an online shopper the opportunity to use multiple shipping addresses as per his convenience.

Magento Hosting Disadvantages

More Server Requirements

Magento pages are heavy to load unlike those of the other e-commerce softwares therefore ,Magento can take longer to load. It is often recommeneded to use a VPS or dedicated server if you have considerable traffic. Magento cannot often be used on a shared hosting environment and thus this will mean additional costs for a semi dedicated VPS host.

Complicated Code Structure

Customising Magento can be a lot more complicated than customising other open source shopping carts. It is written in PHP but the layout and file structure will take some getting used to for any developer not already familiar with it. Fortunately there are a lot of Magento experienced developers out there on sites like oDesk.