What is Magento? Why is Magento Good?

Posted by Banksthomas on Wednesday, August 24, 2011 · Leave a Comment

Magento has become very much a buzzword in the online software world, but what is Magento Ecommerce?

Quite simply, Magento has become the most popular and quite possibly the best ecommerce platform currently available.

Why is Magento so good?

Well, it is a mixture of excellent functionality, ease of use, system robustness and price, which all combine to create an offering that very few other ecommerce provides can compete with.

Magento launched in 2008 by Varian as an open source ecommerce platform, built on the Zend Framework, using the Entity – Attribute – Value database model. At this point time, there were a few large ecommerce platforms, such as ATG, Intershop and Hybris, that offered ecommerce platforms, but with significantly large price tags.

Most of the ecommerce providers wouldn’t bother getting out of bed unless a client had budgets in excess of £150k. Of course, there was also the bespoke ecommerce route, which itself often carried a substantial investment cost, whilst also having the associated issues of being a bespoke build.

The Magento offering basically turned the ecommerce market place upside down. Magento offered all the functionality and benefits of developed ecommerce platform, but a fraction of the cost. As result, the business performance of Magento since its launch in 2008 has been nothing but phenomenal.

There have been over a million downloads of the Magento software, whilst a whole eco-system supporting Magento has sprung up. Well known corporate clients such as Harvey Nichols, Fred Perry, Nokia, Breville, Inc., Lush, Longine, The North Face, NAF NAF, Time Out, Adidas, KSwiss, Salomon, Christian Louboutan, Pentel, Ford, Paul Smith, Muji, Myla, Movado, Jack Wolfskin, Dockers, Nespresso, I’Ogan, Samsung, Stussy, Interflora, and Villeroy and Boch currently use Magento.

Indeed, the success has been so good that Ebay recently purchased Magento.

So where is Magento today.

Currently there are 4 versions of Magento. For business start-ups, there is the hosted Magento Go solution or the Magento Community deployed edition. For those more established, there are deployed licence versions of Magento, including the professional and enterprise edition.

In addition, Magento also offer an excellent Mobile solution.

Whilst there are some excellent other ecommerce platforms, we feel that Magento is hard to beat.

At Banksthomas, as an authorised Magento partner, we offer a range of Magento solutions. Often the best approach to finding the right solution is to first of all identify your ecommerce requirements, business capabilities and available resources in terms of budget, time and technical infrastructure. Based on this information, it is quite easy to then recommend a Magento solution that can fulfil these requirements.

Feel free to contact us at Banksthomas if you would like to gain more information about Magento or indeed have a product tour or demonstration.

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