Magento Commerce is an open source ecommerce web application built on Zend Framework. Magento Commerce is one of the most flexible and extensible ecommerce platforms. It supports multiple stores and website with flexibility in design.
Advantages
Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms for both online merchants and developers because of its powerful features and extensibility. Main advantages of Magento Commerce are described as below:
- It’s open source and free
- Supports multiple currency, multiple stores and multiple websites
- Built in support for internationalization (I18n)
- User-friendly admin panel
- Powerful administration of products, customers, orders, invoices etc.
- Supports various product types like Configurable, Bundle, Grouped, Virtual, Downloadable
- Support custom options for products
- Flexible and customized product attributes
- Tax system provides flexibility to define tax rules for any country or region.
- Flexible price rules by customer groups
- Flexible promotion rules for discounts and “buy X get Y free”
- Provides very good report system for orders, product stocks etc.
- Follows strict MVC pattern to provide ultimate flexibility over design without any constraint
- One page checkout system and checkout on multiple addresses
- Provides very good content management features
- It’s highly extensible and the extensions can be installed or uninstalled very easily
- Extensions can work out of the box without modifications in existing files
- Excellent interoperability with other systems for accounting and shipping
- Supports lots of payment gateways and shipping methods with built-in modules or third party extensions
- Built-in support for PayPal, Google Checkout, DHL, FedEx, UPS etc.
- Built-in support of analytical tools like Google Analytics
- Built-in support for Search Engine Optimization with support of Google Sitemap, Google Base, Google Site Optimizer etc.
- Developed on completely on open source technologies like PHP, Zend Framework and MySQL
- Large community support
Version History
First Magento preview release was available on August 31, 2007 with lots interesting features like Configurable Products, Grouped Products etc. The first stable release was available on March 31, 2008 including lots of improvements and features.
Version 1.0 (March 31, 2008)
- Added Magento Connect Extension Manager for fast management of Magento Extensions
- Performance improvements for shopping -cart sidebar and summary link
- Improved URL Rewrites generation and refresh
- Added error handling page and notifications
- Implemented Google Checkout newsletter subscription
Version 1.1 (July 24, 2008)
- Introduced new product types: Bundled products and Virtual products
- Feature to add custom options to products
- Added web services API
- Improvements in performance
Version 1.2 (December 29, 2008)
- Support for Downloadable/Digital products
- Layered navigation to site search result page
- Improved site search utilizing MySQL fulltext search
- Added support for fixed taxes on product level
- Added layered navigation cache
Version 1.3 (March 30, 2009)
- Added support for customer file upload and date/time/datetime custom options
- Described all methods in WSDL for SOAP web-services to improve compatibility with .NET, Java and other languages
- Frontend Flat Catalog and improved performance.
Version 1.4 (February 12, 2010)
- Implemented 3D Secure credit card validation (Visa and Mastercard)
- Full review of frontend themes, introduced design cross-package fallback and the base/default theme. Includes SEO and accessibility enhancements. Changes are oriented to dramatically reduce themes maintenance.
- Added ability to define arbitrary cache backends
- Optimized performance of sales reports, added new sales report types
- Added image/media uploader/browser, that can browse entire media folder
- Optimized performance of search indexer
- Made order processing workflow more informative and severe
- Reimplemented 404 and report pages, introduced 503 page, specifically for maintenance purposes
- Improved javascript files merging, added CSS files merging
- Added Widgets functionality, added several widgets out of the box
- Added Custom Variables functionality
- Added lot of new System Configuration options
- Improved order placement reliability
- Added WYSIWYG for CMS and Catalog
- Optimized cache initialization during startup
- Optimized export from grids in admin area
- Improved tax and discount totals calculation
- Replaced admin notification flash popup into a simple HTML overlay
- Implemented product and category URLs per store view
- Added ability to configure entry point using virtualhost environment configuration, rather than creating another physical entry point
- Optimized simple product view without custom options
Version 1.5 (February 8, 2011)
- Improved Import/Export functionality for Products and Customers
- Ability to add and manage composite products when creating or editing orders from the admin
- Enhanced shopping cart features to support editing of product configurations
- Enhanced wishlist functionality
- Alternative media storage using either file system or database
- PayFlow Link integration
- Enhancements to the core API including exposing shopping cart API
- Magento Mobile included in base packaging
Our Expertise
We have very experienced developers with in depth understanding of Magento Commerce coding structure. Our developer has been exploring Magento’s core structure since its first preview release. We started development of extensions and themes before the first official stable release.
Our team has expertise in integrating various payment gateways, shipping carriers and also third party systems such as accounting systems, product data providers like Ingram etc.
We have also expertise in migrating existing ecommerce website developed in any platform like osCommerce, ZenCart, VirtueMart etc. into Magento. We can do migration of product data, customer data and order data from existing site to Magento without losing any valuable information.
Our team has also expertise in mobile commerce with Magento. We can develop themes for Magento which are specifically designed for mobile devices such as iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc. We can also develop standalone mobile application for mobile devices like iPhone, Android, Blackberry etc. which provides flawless integration with existing Magento based ecommerce website.
Future Growth
Magento Commerce has gain popularities very quickly just after its first release because of its powerful features, flexibility in design and extensibility. Magento makes continuous improvement in its features and extensibility with each release.
Recently Magento has announced that eBay Inc. – one of the largest eCommerce companies – agrees to acquire Magento. eBay and Magento will be developing a next generation X.Commerce platform together.
Research and Development
Our team is always upbeat with latest improvements or changes as well as upcoming releases of Magento Commerce. We encourage our team to spend certain amount of time to research on development with Magento. We regularly follow Magento’s official blog, tweets and articles posted by community on different tutorial websites.
Our developers do regular research and explore coding pattern of Magento and the ways to develop Magneto extension maintaining Magento’s native development standards and providing similar extensibility.
Recent Development
We have recently developed and delivered Magento based websites for Apparel store, Electronics Store, Handicraft stores etc. We are actively developing our own Handicraft store IndianArtisan.com and online mall ShopTunnel.com.