So the Magento Ecommerce platform is creating a lot of hype for a lot of reasons. Is it really worth the hype? Or is it just blah blah blah? Well let’s see, here I will be providing a review of the platform and I will try to be as unbiased as possible and will try to ensure that I cover as much as I possibly can (well the main elements at least).

Magento was founded in March 2001 by CEO Roy Rubin and as today is still offered as a paid for PHP based ecommerce or open source solution for the mass of developers, designers and other consumers out there. Magento currently have a customer base of around 60,000 worldwide (which may just tell a story of how good it really but we will find out now). Currently the clients range from large blue chip companies to the smaller companies out there.

So let’s start with the positives

Magento Ecommerce is a powerful application which is also feature rich with its long list extensions / plug-in. The community behind the open source software is large and wide with so many different types of people involved from developers to designers. Ok so some of the features available that I would to discuss:

– Marketing Promotions and Tools

Like any ecommerce site if you don’t offer anything to entice customers to buy than what’s the point. Magento offers features where you are able to offer your consumers coupons, vouchers and other promotional ventures. It can all be managed through the platform making life so much easier. There are whole host of other tools available within this like bundled products, up sells in shopping carts.

– Search Engine Optimisation

Magento is widely recommended by SEOs and online marketers as a great platform for search engine friendly sites. You have the ability to edit Meta data and deal with the following:

o Sitemaps
o Search friendly URLs
o Popular search terms page

– Catalogue Management

This is probably one of the most painstaking tasks with an ecommerce site and Magento aims to make this easy with bulk processing. First off its batch import and export of catalogues is the one the best features available. It can also offer:

o Integrate with Google Shopping
o Inventory management
o Virtual products
o Downloadable digital products

– Order Management

Magento offers an amazing order management facility providing control over

o Fulfilment
o Invoices
o Email notifications
o Customer re-orders

The negatives of Magento:

In all honesty there’s not a huge amount wrong with Magento and most issues relate to the online marketing capabilities of the site, however they are not major problems and can easily be dealt with:

– Inconsistent URL rewrites and Multiple URLs per product

Not great for search engines by any means as things should be consistent and follow as simple pattern. This can also be very confusing for the user.

– Performance

Magento has performance issues but I think by now majority of them have been cleared up and there are only a few little issues left.

Conclusion
Magento should definitely be considered as a viable option for most ecommerce sites due to its dynamic nature. Its faults are there but should not be considered as major issues to a site.

Author Bio: Mithul is writing on behalf of Fluid Creativity, specialists in Magento Ecommerce.

Category: Internet
Keywords: magento ecommerce