Open Source eCommerce That Let's Your Customers Shop With The Best
Open Source Friday Focus this week is on Magento, the leading open source eCommerce solution
By Alan Shimel on Fri, 03/12/10 - 1:14pm.
eCommerce has certainly come a long way since I started using the Internet 15 or so years ago. Around then the "Amazon experience" was extraordinary. Now using open source eCommerce software from Magento, you can create an online shopping experience that will rival Amazon and some of the biggest merchants on the net.
Back in the late 90's most sites used what we called "shopping cart" applications to build an eCommerce store. Of course some of these were pretty rudimentary. Just clicking on a picture of an item which fired off an email to contact you to buy was considered eCommerce. If you had a shopping cart that created a database of items, prices and shipping options and the pages where created on "the fly", whoa, that was big time. You had to pay some serious cash for that kind of functionality.Of course updating prices, running specials and any number of other retail functions required amazing acts of programming skill. But that is not the case anymore.
Today there are a wide range of eCommerce platforms that can let you duplicate the terrific experience that Amazon and other online merchants offer. One such solution is an open source platform called Magento. Magento has been downloaded over a million times since 2001. Owned and developed by Varien, it is offered under a dual licensed model. The community edition is a free open source edition with only forum support. Varien also offers an enterprise edition with even more features and premium support. Varien describes Magento as:
Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source eCommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store. Magento’s powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools give merchants the power to create ecommerce sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. And this ain't your dad's shopping cart either!
A list of features available is pretty shocking:
Marketing Promotions and Tools
- Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing
iPhone Optimized
- Re-orders from account
- Downloadable Products
- Recently ordered items
- 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
I think you would have to agree that there are few stones left unturned in the eCommerce feature set. The experience of the store builder is equally as rich. Varien has You Tube videos that walk you through every step of the way.They also offer a forum, wiki and a host of other great ways to interact with the large community of fellow store designers, but the company as well.
I am enclosing a few screen shots and a YouTube to give you an idea of what I am talking about. Magento runs a variety of platforms. If you are in search of a great eCommerce solution that gives you all the bells and whistles, this open source gem could put you right up there with biggest and best on the web!
Example of front of Magento Store:
Example of back of store admin:
- About Open Source Fact and Fiction
As co-founder and Managing Partner at The CISO Group, Alan Shimel is responsible for driving the vision and mission of the company. The CISO Group offers security consulting and PCI compliance management for the payment card industry. Prior to The CISO Group, Alan was the Chief Strategy Officer at StillSecure. Shimel was the public persona of StillSecure as it grew from start up to helping defend some of the largest and most sensitive networks in the world.
Shimel is an often-cited personality in the technology community and is a sought-after speaker at industry and government conferences and events. His commentary about the state of security, open source and life is followed closely by many industry insiders via his blog and podcast, "Ashimmy, After All These Years" (www.ashimmy.com). Alan is now also a regular contributor to The CISO Group’s security.exe blog and podcast.
Alan has helped build several successful technology companies by combining a strong business background with a deep knowledge of technology. His legal background, long experience in the field, and New York street smarts combine to form a unique personality.
Disclosure: The CISO Group sells a software-as-a-service PCI compliance application called SAQPro. The company is independent and does not represent any other vendor's products as a reseller.
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