Magento has been picking up a lot of attention recently, and some retailers may be wondering, ‘What is Magento?’

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source ecommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, merchandising and content management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs, putting no constraints on business processes and flow. When Magento was released in 2007, it transformed the ecommerce platform market. In a period of 18 months, Magento surpassed one million downloads and now records billions of dollars of transactions worldwide by tens of thousands of merchants. Purchased by eBay in early 2011, it continues to be the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world.

Magento is written in PHP and utilises the Zend Framework (which is MVC based) and uses an EAV-based MySQL database. The system is highly modular and Magento’s architecture handles module database schema updates automatically.

Magento comes in 3 versions for different business sizes and models:

• Magento Go
• Magento Community
• Magento Enterprise

At Ampersand Commerce, we choose to work exclusively with Magento Enterprise because of the scalability the platform provides to retailers.

The features in Magento Enterprise can:

• Turn browsers into buyers with marketing and merchandising tools, up-sell and cross-sell, and special pricing programmes and promotions.
• Personalise the customer experience with superior search capabilities, special storefronts for specific customer groups, and preference and behavior-based content delivery.
• Build Magento to fit your business with easy integration with 3rd party applications, flexible product/catalog management, and comprehensive admin capabilities including multi-site management.

Magento Enterprise Features in-depth:

More information about Magento Enterprise >

Are you a retailer considering Magento Enterprise and looking for a solution partner? Say hello, or checkout some of our customer success stories. Also, make sure to check out our About You page to make sure we are a good fit.

Are you a developer curious about Magento Enterprise development? Check out our own Joseph McDermott’s ‘Developer’s Guide to Magento’ on Smashing Magazine.