In the last 6 months, I have been closely paying attention to the development and maturation of Magento Commerce – the latest and by far greatest open source eCommerce solution. After implementing it on a few development domains here at Trinity, I quickly realized that this solution is head and shoulders above OS Commerce – the long standing king of open source eCommerce platforms.
Even in a standard installation, with no customization from a technology perspective, I was blown away at the level of functionality that is provided. Here are some snapshots of what this software can provide.
- Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
- 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 Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
- RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
Wow. I know many enterprise level platforms that do not have this type of functionality. Most impressive to me was the ajax based cart page that allows a user to progress through a transaction without having a page load as well as the guided navigation functionality that is allowed to be customized through the back end by aligning attributes to the taxonomy.
What is a bit of a challenge at this stage is finding developers for the software. Being that is so new to the marketplace, you have to hunt to find someone with experience.
I highly recommend loading the software on a domain and having some fun with the customization capabilities.
