It's so full featured that companies like 3M, The North Face and Samsung are using it 

For 14 years I've been working in Internet marketing, web applications and web design. Worcester, MA--the location of my home office--and the surrounding areas have been my main focus over the past year, although I've historically served customers nationally and around the world. While I've done some Magento consulting in the Worcester area, one thing I've noticed about the business of web design in Worcester is that businesses around here are not quick to adopt new things, such as open source. That's part of the reason for this blog--to spread awareness of the great business benefits that can be reaped by adopting open source web technology.

While Drupal--an open source content management system (CMS)--is hands-down the best choice for content-heavy websites, Magento Commerce is also, hands-down, the best choice for a web store. Getting back to the fact that businesses in Worcester are slow to adopt new things like open source--I'm here to say that Magento is one of the best new things to enter the world of open source software in last decade. In this post, I'll highlight some of its best features and the benefits that come with it.

Magento is also extremely powerful, technically speaking

What is Magento?

Magento is a piece of open source software that allows you to create an online store where you can sell anything, just like Amazon. What does open source mean? Well, a company called Varien created Magento and then released to the world for free and gave them to power to do whatever they wanted with it. In the three years since it's release, Magento has grown into the superior e-commerce system.

Why Magento is the Best

Without going into too much detail, Magento has the majority of the common features that you would come across when you shop on large retail sites like Amazon such as, customer reviews, related products, wish lists, reward points systems and shipping/order processing integration with all the major carriers like UPS, Fedex, etc. It's so full featured that companies like 3M, The North Face and Samsung are using it.

There are other open source e-commerce systems that are free like ZenCart and osCommerce, but they have severely wained in popularity since Magento's release.

This chart, which came from Google Trends, shows that while osCommerce enjoyed a great amount of success in the past, it has dropped off considerably since Magento's release. Magento is set to continue to increase in popularity and usage over the next several years.

Magento's way of organizing and presenting products and categories allows the visitor to easily focus on their search for a particular product

Magento is also extremely powerful, technically speaking and, since it's open source, you can modify it to do whatever it is that may be specific to your business model. For example, we have one client that we're working with who currently drop ships their products from multiple suppliers. Since we have access to the source code, we're able to automate the order processing so that Magento will automatically send purchase orders to the right supplier even if the customer's order has items from several different suppliers. And it won't matter if supplier A wants to receive an email purchase order and supplier B wants to receive a fax order. That's the power of the open source model in Magento.

One of the biggest issues with online retailers today is search engine optimization (SEO). If the product content in the store is not organized efficiently and according to Google's standards, that store will suffer. Magento was built with this challenge in mind. Many online stores today that are stuck on old systems like osCommerce have a huge dilemma in trying to optimize content for hundreds or thousands of products. Magento makes it easy to optimize content from the very beginning. Moving product content into Magento from an old system can be challenging, but it can also be automated to take away a lot of the legwork.

Another benefit to the superior product organization in Magento is usability. Have you ever opened a website and immediately left because you felt like your brain would explode? There are many online stores and websites that just offer way to many options and links on the home page. This just paralyzes a visitor mentally. Magento's way of organizing and presenting products and categories allows the visitor to easily focus on their search for a particular product. Dynamic hierarchal menus remove potentially overwhelming lists of products and categories from the visitors initial view and allow the visitor to explore them when they're ready.

The fact, too, that Magento is so popular and open means that it has "plugins" to other commonly used systems like Quickbooks and other online services, such as email marketing. This goes a long way toward growth and streamlining your entire business.

In summary, Magento is hands-down, the best choice if you're considering creating or redesigning an online store. Definitely don't choose a system that is designed by a vendor and only used by their clients. This will lock you in and limit the power you have to integrate, upgrade and freely manage your store. There are many, many Magento solution providers, including aimtheory, that can help you with your online store and you don't have to worry about being tied to one if you're ever unsatisfied. You can take your Magento store wherever you want and hire whoever your want to work on it.

If you have more questions about Magento or e-commerce, please contact us. We'll be happy to help.