Introduction

Magento is a powerful new eCommerce platform built on the Open Source initiative and based on the Zend framework. Magento Commerce is feature-rich out of the box, and is set to become the de-facto standard for open source eCommerce platforms. The platform offers complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of an online store.

The Magento Demo Store

The Product Details Page

Features

The list of features provided by Magento support all the functionalities that most small to medium sized eCommerce merchants would ever need. The features encompass typical areas of an eCommerce site, such as:

• Catalog Browsing
• Catalog Management
• Product Browsing
• Shipping Integrations
• Payment Integrations
• Order Management
• Checkout
• SEO
• Marketing Promotions and Tools
• Customer Accounts
• Customer Service
• Internationalization
• Site Management
• Analytics and Reports
• Mobile Commerce

For a complete list of features, click here.

Shopping Cart Page with cross-sell, options for entering coupons and estimating shipping and tax

Example of Client Side Validations on a form

Though Magento provides a whole gamut of functionalities, the ones that stand out are:

• AJAX based Single Screen Checkout
• Layered Navigation - product filtering based on every product attribute. The screencast is available here.
• Setting up of complex promotions
• Consolidated management of multiple websites
• Out-of-the box features like

                  •    Integrated with Paypal products - Website Payment Standard/Pro, PayFlow Pro
                  •    Multiple payment options including Google Checkout, checks, money orders, purchase orders e
                  •    Internationalization
                  •    Real-time shipping rate calculations from UPS, FedEx, USPS, DHL
                  •    Google products like Analytics and Site Map

• Excellant templating system for UI layering

The Product List page with 'Layered Navigation' - filtering based on product attributes

Single Screen Checkout

Magento has a growing user/developer community and its website provides a great set of resources in the form of Screencasts, User Guide, Webinars, Knowledge Base and Technical Docs. A wide range of support is provided through different levels of paid subscriptions. This open source application continues to mature and the latest release addresses performace related issues that significantly slowed down the site in the initial beta release.

Magento has gained ground in the small and medium eCommerce space and will continue to become popular through its advanced featureset and functionalities. It more-than-adequately addresses the entry level needs of  eCommerce merchants. Through its open source, feature-rich, supported and robust solution, merchants will increasingly be attracted to Magento as their eCommerce platform-of-choice.

Screenshots sourced from the Magento website here.