Magento - The New Face of E-commerce

April 21 2008

For the last few weeks our Hosting department have been talking up Magento as the next big thing in eCommerce. So with the PHP5 hosting taking off and our test site up and running, we thought we’d take a look at Magento from a web design point of view. 

Designing a Magento site is made easy because all of Magento’s templates are 100% customisable.  This means that we can produce stylish, professional eCommerce sites that are unique to each of our clients.

Magento’s features list out rivals any other eCommerce solution on the market.  It includes all the features you’d expect from a good eCommerce solution including:

• Order status and history
• Order Tracking
• Shipping and billing flexibility
• Product Searches
• Email Notifications
• Easy site management

It also includes many extra features that make it stand out from other eCommerce solutions. Here’s a few of our favourites:

• Product reviews
• Product comparisons
• Support for multiple currencies, languages and tax rates (comes in handy when most eCommerce solutions are American!)
• Multiple stores
• One page checkouts
• Search engine optimisation

Magento is built on the latest PHP technology for increased security and is open source, so extra functionality can be added at any time.  Magento comes with a few payment gateways already integrated, including PayPal, but almost all payment gateways can be integrated with ease.

With such a customisable design and with a huge list of features it’s easy to see why Magento has caused such a buzz.  With our first Magento site in the pipeline we are really looking forward to making some great sites.