Magento - Overview

What is E-commerce?

E-commerce (Electronic Commerce) is a type of business that involves the commercial transaction or purchasing or selling of goods and services through electronic channels known as internet. It was first introduced in the year 1960 through EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) on VAN(Value - added network). Using E-commerce, you can sell the physical products, selling of services (where the payment is made online).

Following are the categories of E-commerce:

• B2B (Business to Business): This transaction is between businesses, it is between wholesaler and retailer or between manufacturer and wholesaler.
• B2C (Business to consumer): This transaction is between business and consumer. In this type, merchants sell products to consumer through shopping cart software.
• C2C (Consumer to Consumer): In this type of transaction one consumer or customer interacts with other consumer through internet.
• C2B (Consumer to Business): This transaction is between consumer or customer and business or companies where consumer makes a product that the company uses to complete business.

What is Magento?

Magento is an open source E-commerce software, created by Varien which is useful for online business and it has the flexible modular architecture. It is scalable and it has many control options that helps the user. Magento uses E-commerce platform which offers companies ultimate E-commerce solutions and extensive support network.
Magento allow user to update E-commerce website automatically. It is simple, quick and versatile to use.

History

Magento was developed by Varien Inc. and initially released on March 31, 2008.

Why to use Magento?

• Magento is an open source E-commerce software.
• It is scalable and offers small companies to build business.
• It provides the searching and sorting of products in several ways.
• Easily integrates with many of the third-party sites which are needed to run effective E-commerce website.
• Using this, customer can order or purchase number of products. There are no limits on number of purchasing products.

Features

• Magento provides different payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, cheques, money order, Google checkouts.
• It provides shipping of products in one order to the multiple addresses.
• Easy to manage the orders by using admin panel.
• It provides order of product status and history of product. It also supports e-mail and RSS feeds.
• It supports for multiple languages, different countries currencies and tax rates.
• It filters the products and displays in grid or list format.
• It makes simple to browse the products. It has features such as image zoom-in and checking of stock availability.
• It has built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Advantages

• It is user friendly E-commerce software.
• It is compatible with Smartphone's, tablets and other mobile devices.
• It provides multiple payment options so every visitor can make payment based on their preferred payment gateway.
• It has many extensions which supports for the development of an online store.

Disadvantages

• Magento uses larger disk space and memory.
• It takes much time to build the customized functionality.
• It is very slow compared to other E-commerce sites.
• It needs proper hosting environment, if the hosting environment is improper the user can face the problems.