Unleashing the power of Magento

Unleashing the power of Magento

Magento (Version 1) was launched on March 31st, 2008. Magento is the new ecommerce platform that’s going to change the Industry. It is developed in zend MVC framework.

It offers complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of an ecommerce store while development. It provides the functionality for reviews, tags, wish list, compare products and many more. It is integrated with AJAX rich environment technology for facilitating features like one click checkout. It is integrated with real time shipping rate from SPS, SPS XML, FedEx, USPS, and DHL. Customer can ship the order to multiple addresses and on site tracking system from customer account. Shipping rate can be easily set per order and per item. It provides the exclusive functionality rating with weight and destination.

From customer point of view, it is 100% search engine friendly and provides full control of URL’s rewrite methodology. Magento is compatible with multi language support as well as supports multiple currencies. Administration module is having great functionality for rights or access and any rights can be defined at any user. It allows defining multiple administrators with specific access privileges. Landing page of admin panel is in form of a dashboard providing all vital information of orders, products, and graphical representation on daily, monthly and yearly basis. Admin can create multiple store and easily manage them from admin panel. It provides the strong interface and functionality for reporting.

Unparalleled Features

Analytics and Reporting

• Integrated with google analytics
• Admin dashboard for report overview
• Sales report
• RSS feed for new orders
• Tax report
• Abandoned shopping cart report
• Best viewed products report
• Best purchased products report
• Low stock report
• Search terms report
• Product reviews report
• RSS feed for new reviews
• Tags report
• RSS feed for new tags
• Coupon usage report
• Total sales invoiced
• Total sales refunded
• Best customers report by total and number of orders

Product Browsing

• Multiple images with zoom
• Product reviews
• Related products
• Stock availability
• Multi-tier pricing up sell
• Product option selection
• Grouped products view
• Add to wish list
• Send to a friend with email

Catalog Browsing

• Layered/ faceted navigation for filtering of products
• Static block tool to create category landing pages
• Ability to assign designs on category and product level (unique design per product/category)
• Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
• Recently viewed pro ducts
• Product comparisons
• Recently compared products
• Cross-sells, up-sells and related Items
• Popular search terms cloud
• Filter by product tags
• Product reviews
• Product listing in grid or list format
• Breadcrumbs

Catalog Management

• Inventory management with backordered items, minimum and maximum quantities
• Batch import and export of catalog
• Batch updates to products in admin panel
• Simple, configurable (e.g. size, color, etc.) and grouped products
• Tax rates per location, customer group and product type
• Attribute sets for quick product creation of different item types
• Create store-specific attributes on the fly
• Media manager with automatic image resizing and watermarking
• Advanced pricing rules and support for special prices (see marketing tools)
• Search results rewrites and redirects
• Approve, edit and delete product tags
• Approve, edit and delete product reviews
• RSS feed for low inventory alerts

Customer Accounts

• Order status and history
• Re-orders from account
• Recently ordered items
• Address book with unlimited addresses
• Default billing and shipping addresses
• Wish list with ability to add comments
• Email or send RSS feed of wish list
• Newsletter subscription management
• Product reviews submitted
• Product tags submitted
• Account dashboard for overview of: recent orders, personal information, newsletter subscription status, primary billing address, primary shipping address, shopping cart, wish list, recently ordered items, recently reviews and recent tags

Customer Service

• Contact us form
• Feature-rich customer accounts
• Order history with status updates
• Order tracking from account
• Forgot password email from front-end and administration panel
• Order and account update emails
• Customizable order emails
• Create and edit orders from the admin panel

Order Management

• View, edit, create and fulfill orders from admin panel.
• Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment
• Print invoices and packing slips
• Call center (phone) order creation
  • Includes ability to create new customer, or select existing customer and view shopping cart, wish list, last ordered items, and compared products list, as well as select addresses, give discounts and assign custom prices.
• Create re-orders for customers from administration panel.
• Email notifications of orders
• RSS feed of new orders

Payment

• Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
• Integrated with multiple paypal gateways:
  • Website payments standard, website payments pro (express and direct),
    Website payments pro UK (express and direct), and paypal payflow pro
• Integrated with authorize.net
• Integrated with google checkout (Level 2)
• Saved credit card method for offline payments
• Accept checks/money orders
• Accept purchase orders

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
• Multiple shipments per order
• Ability to specify allowed destination countries per method
• Flat rate shipping per order
• Flat rate shipping per item
• Free shipping
• 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
• Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
• Checkout without account/guest checkout flat rate shipping per order
• Shopping cart with tax and shipping estimates
• Checkout with account to use address book
• Option to create account at beginning of checkout
• Accept gift messages per order and per item
• Saved shopping carts with configurable expiration time

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 site map for display on site
Auto-generated popular search terms page

International Support

• Multi-lingual
• Support for multiple currencies
• Tax rate support
• Localization
• Configurable list of allowed countries for:
  • Site registration
  • Shipping destination addresses with ability to specify per shipping method
  • Billing addresses with ability to specify per payment method

Marketing Promotions and Tools

• Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories. For example: percent discount | fixed amount discount | free shipping | Buy x, get y free. | Buy x, get y with percent or fixed amount discount | Buy x, get free shipping on order | Buy x, get percent discount | Buy x, get fixed amount discount. support for multiple currencies
• Catalog promotional pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products localization
• Free shipping option
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
• Customer group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
• Landing page tool for campaigns
• Search engine friendly URL’s
• URL rewrites
• Recently viewed products
• Recently compared Items
• New Items promotional tool
• Up-sells in shopping cart
• Cross-sells on product pages
• Send to a friend for all visitors, or registered users only
• Send wish list to a friend by email or RSS
• RSS feeds for new products, new specials and new tags
• Auto-generated site map
• Google site map
• Polls
• Site registration
• Shipping destination addresses with ability to specify per shipping method
• Billing addresses with ability to specify per payment method
• 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
• Multi-lingual
• Support for localization
• Support for multiple currencies
• Administration permission system roles and users
• Flexible tax rate management with support for US and International markets
• Fully 100% customizable design using templates
• Customer groups
• One-click upgrades
• Content management system for informational pages

Magento Architecture

Advantages

• Your business does a significant amount of business around mother’s day/valentine’s day/christmas/halloween/etc. and you want to make sure your site will look the part, with Magento this is possible through a highly evolved template system through which it is possible to brand a website for the occasions, events etc.
• Design flexibility: magento allows you to have a complete control over design of your site and it manages it through the model view controller architected and this means,
  • You can easily manage how each part in your website is displayed.
  • Different Landing pages for different audience.
  • Flexible product page design to complement the variation in products.
• Layered Navigation: Usually with large inventories where a category has got more than 50 products, it really is cumbersome to have all the products in the scope of view, and Magento use several filtering tools to provide faster navigation to products.
• Product comparisons and product tagging features.
• Convenience for your customers should be a paramount priority for any ecommerce retailer. that’s why Magento includes multiple ship-to functionality right out of the box, helping avoid the frustration that can occur when a customer is shopping for multiple people at one time. Instead of forcing them to place multiple transactions, they can quickly and easily ship to multiple addresses with one order. This can be especially useful around the holidays, when more and more people are doing their primary holiday shopping online.
• Superior product search module when compared to competition.
• Amazing support community.
• Good business model.
• Marketing promotions and tools
• Multi-lingual support
• Multiple currency payment processing
• Search engine optimization features like google site map, URL rewrites give full control of URL’s act.
• Analytics, reporting and dash board for quick view.
• Extensive CMS to manage contents.

Disadvantages

• The greatest disadvantage of that system is that it’s slow then other shopping carts.
• It doesn’t work with standard 8 Mb configuration of your PHP engine.
• You need some NOT ever usual extensions of your PHP (which is PHP 5.2.0 or newer):
  • PDO/MySQL
  • MySQLi
  • mcrypt
  • mhash
  • simplexml
  • DOM

Conclusion

Outstanding work, Magento’s first stable version is already miles ahead of its competitors. The Open Source ecommerce has finally evolved.