I have already covered Zlio, a free hosted service that let you build your own online shop and start selling thousands of products from their merchants. In addition, I also mentioned Shopify, an e-commerce solution (also hosted) to sell your own products online. Both of them have disadvantages - to named a few, the fees and order limits with Shopify and the choice of products with Zlio.
To run an online shop (not hosted) to sell products with total control in all aspects, an e-commerce application is needed. The most popular free e-commerce applications that are available today are osCommerce and Zen Cart.
Varien, a Los Angeles web development firm, has also its own open source e-commerce platform called Magento. Magento is currently on early beta stages, BETA 0.6 at the time of writing, thus it is not recommended to be used on production environments. Though it’s still in beta, it already comes with the usual e-commerce features plus more that looks promising and somewhat follow the new trends. Listed below are some of the nice features of Magento that I like, some are currently not implemented:
- Multiple Websites
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Marketing features - Multi-Tier Pricing and Coupons
- Search Engine Friendly URLs and Meta Tags
- Product Tagging
- Product Comparison
- Permissions
- Multiple Payment Systems & Shipping
One thing I would like to have in this rising ecommerce platform is to integrate a complete affiliate program into the system. Affiliate program does not only boost sales for shop owners but it can also help others, that cannot build online shop, to make money from online shops powered by Magento.
Check out Magento for a detailed info. It will be a great application in the near future and it might help you if you are planning to build your online shop. I suggest to subscribe to their newsletter to stay updated with future releases.
3 Pings to “Magento - Open Source eCommerce Evolved”
4 Responses to “Magento - Open Source eCommerce Evolved”
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1. KingJacob Says:
September 11th, 2007 at 1:14 pmIve made a few successful affiliate stores with html and cj products
so this looks interesting. -
2. Daniel Harrison Says:
September 11th, 2007 at 7:19 pmLooks like a decent CMS! You might also want to consider CubeCart, as there is a free version. However, CubeCart does have affiliate integration!
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3. Herve Says:
October 3rd, 2007 at 4:12 pmThe latest version is now available for download. The biggest highlight of the release is PayPal integration (view screencast) and multi-lingual support.
Magento supports two different PayPal methods for use in your websites and stores: PayPal Express, which allows the customer to check out from the PayPal site, and PayPal Direct, which offers credit card processing capability without the customer having to ever leave your store.
Hervé
The Magento Directory
http://mgosites.com -
4. Yoav (Magento team) Says:
January 5th, 2008 at 4:38 amHi,
Thanks for the kind words about our open-source-ecommerce solution, Magento.
I wanted to let you know that we have plans to include an affiliate module into Magento in future releases. However, this module will not compete with other 3rd party affiliate solutions that we recommend integrating with for any eCommerce site that wants to drive traffic from affiliates. We will also include in the near future integrations with such 3rd party affiliate solutions out-of-the-box.
I also wanted to note that we plan to release the first production version of Magento by the end of Q1 2008.
Thanks again,
yoav
September 15th, 2007 at 12:49 am
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