Bitconscious

Are you searching for an e-commerce platform that is easy, flexible and full of functionality, but the market doesn’t seem to offer anything of the kind?

Perhaps that’s because Magento, the new open-source platform dedicated to the electronic commerce didn’t exist until now!

From the site you can download the latest Beta version (0.6) with which you can become familiar with, and explore the numerous and advanced functions made available to the user. Let’s have a look at a rundown of the most prominent characteristics of this very promising software.

Magento is based on the noted stack LAMP (Linux, Apache, Mysql, Php), therefore, is an easy environment to find among the numerous hosting and housing service packages and even more common in various data-center enterprises.

The development team guarantees compatibility with the Windows environment, even renouncing certain features such as image uploading (in the current version).

Installation is very simple in order to satisfy all the requests, in particular, the availability of the mod_rewrite module for Apache and the HTTPS protocol qualification on web servers. Once the compilation of the installation wizard is complete, you can proceed to the configuration/creation of your own store.

A big help is the presence of a demo store that allows, without difficulty, the creation of new products and the ability to see them immediately at the front end of the site, besides being able to quickly experiment with different options in order to understand what impact they have on the site.

The extreme care of the products can be seen in the accurate web 2.0-style graphics, and in the presence of advanced characteristics such as multi-languages, multi-store management, and the care taken in implementing SEO optimizations.

The social-shopping component is already developed enough to allow your store’s registered users to tag, comment and express an opinion about the products, all useful elements for promoting your articles, and creating cross-selling mechanisms.

Ever a very interesting catalogue level, the presence of the product appearance function, the wish list, and the chance to filter articles present in your store by category, manufacturer, price range, etc. following the model available at Amazon.

Magento has at its core even a small CMS which allows you to customize your store’s page; unfortunately it is not an instantaneous instrument, as it doesn’t allow for visual editing but only the specification of certain page contents, while its appearance is determined by the page template.

Its most interesting feature is the possibility of defining rules which allow doing promotions such as quantity discounts, discounts for correlated articles, coupons, etc.

The rule engine is very simple to use and allows you to link more conditions tied to the product, the category, the manufacturer, the number of articles in the cart and many others, allowing the segmenting of the offer and creating new opportunities for cross-selling.

The store administrator can rely on a large variety of reports that allows him to monitor site progress and verify the effectiveness of the promotions, offers and the social shopping instruments. Also available are client communication instruments such as the internal newsletter (configurable in many aspects) and the survey, both able to be monitored by the omnipresent report.

Magento, despite its BETA label and relative newness of being still at version 0.6 not recommended for production, presents very advanced characteristics, available normally only for commercial platforms. The development roadmap promises further functionality of enterprise character such as the possibility to give products, digital goods and support to RMA by the end of the year.

In conclusion, Magento seems to be a reality on a fast track, and worthy of consideration in view of the release of 1.0 in 2008.

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