If you are building your own website to launch say a line of dresses or nutritional supplements online shopping site, you need to invest time in selecting a good ecommerce solution.

Enter Magento – a powerful package that covers AZ of all the necessary features for your online shopping site.

Launched in 2008, Magento has become one of the most respected and reliable ecommerce platform.

It has over 90,000 merchants, and nearly 2.5 million downloads. The salient feature of Magento is that it can be successfully applied to any entity, from a small scale mom and pop store to a Multi National Company with stores all over the globe.

You can customize starting from the theme, to the details of products sold, and then get a set of analytics to track, analyze your sales, generate reports and secure payment gateways.

Magento has them all, in easy to understand menus and configuration setup panels.

The following are the features of Magento –

Product Browsing – Where each product can have multiple images, you specify the price, stock, and attributes including custom attributes of products.

Catalog Browsing – Product comparison

Customer Accounts – Order status, Billing, shipping and history

Payment – Options to pay by credit card, PayPal including external payment modules.

Shipping – Specify Multiple addresses, Various options to ship (FedEx, USPS etc)

SEO – Search Engine Optimized. Magento is one of the most SEO friendly ecommerce application, you can specify the tags and links to your products

Check out panel

Marketing Promotion – Coupons, Discounts and promotional options

Multiple Language Support including multiple treaties

Report Generation – Analyze the shopping patterns in your website by studying Sales, Product and shopping cart reports

Built In Google Analytics – Page View Tracking and Ecommerce Tracking (list of what customers buy)

Some of the customers using Magento are –

In Kind Direct – Charity that redistributes surplus goods from manufacturers to other charities

Fun4kids – Outdoor toy retailer

Exclusively. In – Styles in fashion and home decor from India.

Watco – Leading direct supplies for building maintenance in UK.

Handlehaus Legler – Wholesale merchandiser of Toys in Germany.

Magento also offers advice and guidance through the Expert Consulting Group (ECG). The ECG analyzes merchant's needs and provides recommendation and action plans that help them use the capabilities of Magento for maximum impact.

Apart from building online shopping sites, Magento can also be used to develop dynamic web applications because it is an object oriented PHP Framework. Although it is not a very well-known aspect of Magento, it provides the programmers easy customizable building blocks for building web applications.

DCKAP is a Global IT company that specializes in technological solutions for its clients with offices in USA, India and Australia.

Source by Benerald Cannison