|
| |
|
"The work completed
was excellent! I.T. Web Experts was very
responsive to our needs and got the job
done! It was also easy to go over tweaks
and changes as we went along. Thanks sooooo
much. We really love what you have done
for us! Our users are impressed with our
site as well, we are receiving feedback
almost daily saying what a great site we
have!" |
|
Debra
Aldred
Treasurer, United Fan Con Inc. |
|
|
|
| |
 |
Magento – The Next Generation In Open Source Shopping Carts |
 |
|
| |
| |
| |
There are many open source shopping carts available that don’t charge licensing fees. Some of these include Oscommerce, CubeCart, and ZenCart. But all of them have quite a few disadvantages. For example, Oscommerce has been very slow in getting new releases, causing it to be a tacked on package when you install all the modules that are needed. ZenCart is nice, but also based on Oscommerce, and lacks out of the box features such as product spreadsheet importing, and the admin is arguable a little messy. What was needed is a new open source shopping cart developed from the ground up, a fresh start so to speak. That is where Magento comes in.
We have been experimenting with Magento since its beta phase and love the structure and design of the system. It is based on the latest PHP 5 coding standards making it easier to customize and faster to load.
Advantages to Using Magento for Your E-commerce Web Store
Easier to Template/Modify Design: The template structure of Magento makes modifying the design much easier to accomplish in a shorter amount of time.
SEO Tools: The built in SEO tools for Magento are top notch for modifying the meta tags, urls, and many other areas that affect your search engine rankings.
Single Page Checkout: A highly requested feature that just wasn’t possible to do without breaking the code on other shopping carts. One page checkout simplifies the checkout process for your customers.
Google Checkout: Out of the box support for Google Checkout, one of the most popular payment gateways.
Shipping Estimator Without Account Creation: Give your customers the answer to one of their most common questions without requiring them to create an account.
Customer/Order Editing: The ability to edit an order once it has already been placed is not a common feature in most shopping carts. Magento gives an easy way to edit customer orders.
Requirements to Run Magento
You will need PHP 5/MySQL 4+ web hosting which is offered by the majority of web hosts out there. You will need the following extensions for PHP: PDO/MySQL, mcrypt, hash, simplexml, GD, DOM, iconv. Linux is recommended for your web hosting, Windows will work but has a few known issues.
The web hosting cost are significant to host Magento and get decent browsing speed. You need a semi-dedicated server which runs about $25-$100/month
Programming Services for Magento
Magento is an open source shopping cart, meaning the code can easily be edited by programmers. You will find a variety of programming services available for Magento, including those through I.T. Web Experts.
|
|
|
|
|
