Good Ezines

Magento is currently the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce platform and it is now used by 30,000 merchants. It has over 2000 extensions available and has been downloaded over 1.5 million times.

There is an enterprise edition and a free community open source edition that has an incredible array of features. Perhaps one of Magento’s best features is the ability to run multiple e-commerce stores from one admin area.

One of its other main benefits is a one-page checkout with the ability to ship products to multiple addresses.

You have the option of having one store selling lots of different products and then creating a store for each niche. So for example, if you have a store selling pool tables, table tennis tables, air hockey tables, you can create a separate store for each, all using the same database.

Magento is also iPhone optimised to allow shoppers to make purchases from your store with their iPhone.

From a customer point of view my Magento also has a wide range of useful features. Customers are able to view their account information including not only the order history, but also to manage the addresses they send items to and to control if they are subscribed to newsletters.

Installing Magento is very easy and some hosting companies such as Hostmonster have a one click install allowing anyone with no technical knowledge to easily get their own store up and running.

A Magento store can easily be made to look stunning with the help of a customised theme and there are several websites with many quality themes available now.

Once you have your Magento e-commerce store is running, another important requirement of course is traffic. Magento has the ability to automatically produce search engine friendly URL s. It also produces a site map to ensure your website has all its pages indexed by the search engines.

You will also have the option of entering Meta information for individual products and categories allowing you to optimise each page for maximum search engine friendliness.

Once you have traffic to your store it is important to be able to analyse statistics and thankfully Magento has several useful reports available including, searched terms used, total sales, best customers, most viewed products and low stock reports.

Magento has also made it easy to use Google website optimizer to split test various elements of pages in the store allowing you to increase your conversion rate.

As Magento has been going for a while now, there is a large community forum evolved to help new users with the many questions they will have.

The company who created Magento e-commerce platform is called Varien and they are based in Los Angeles California.They are a small group of highly motivated e-commerce experts that became frustrated by the other open source shopping cart software available. Consequently they decided to create their own and that is how Magento commerce was born.

So to summarise Magento offers excellent and free e-commerce store software and we highly recommend it.

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