One of our clients is using an in-house system for maintaining product catalogs, customers, inventory, shopping carts, etc. Being an in-house system, it isn’t very scaleable and changes to the system take a long time to implement. So for them, we are going to be installing and setting up Magento.
Now I’ve only just started to become familiar with the platform. I should also mention that I have no experience working with other eCommerce platforms like OSCommerce or anything, but the talk-of-the-town is that Magento blows everything else out of the water. More importantly, based on what I’ve read in their comprehensive User Guide, the software can handle (1) everything our client needs, (2) everything they’ve requested, and (3) everything our client hasn’t even thought of yet.
Some of the cool stuff includes:
- Automatic product comparisons page (based on product attributes that you define)
- “Layered navigation” – when browsing through a category of products, the layered navigation offers nifty drill-down filters so shoppers can easily find products that are within their budget/needs/tastes.
- Related products, upselling, and cross-sellling (important to know the distinction between the three)
- URL rewrites (very very very important for SEO)
- Support for UPS, UPS XML, FedEx, USPS, and DHL
- Multiple images per product and slick zoom-in capability
For the full feature list, go here.
Expect more posts regarding Magento to come as I journey through deployment. This post was just kind of like a trailer.
