Magento is a eCommerce platform designed to be flexible, scalable and very user friendly. Not only does it blast the competition out of the water but it is also built to be SEO friendly with Google API integration and a massive range of available plugins and modules. This tutorial will give an overview of Magento and why I think you should use it for your next website.

[note:] This post isn’t really SEO advice but rather talks about my favourite ecommerce system.

What Is Magento?

To put it simply, Magento is a 21st century ecommerce system. It is built on a modern set of technologies and built to be very scalable. Meaning you can have a store with tens of thousands of products without a hitch. Some other reasons to use Magento are:

• A Simple Intuitive Interface
• Easy To Download, Install & Maintain
• Built on current technologies unlike other systems.
• Multiple Site Functionality
• Built to be SEO friendly and integrates with the Google API
• And best of all…It’s free and open source!

Why Should I Use It?

Magento is the system for experienced web developers looking for a highly scalable, multi-store enabled ecommerce system that not only works for them but also for their clients. The backend system is one of the best that I have seen around.

The system is also open source and you can modify and work with the code in any way you like. A rich community exists with plenty of plugins and modules to chose from.

Some further statistics from the Magento website:

• $25 billion in transactions
• 60,000+ merchants
• 2,000+ extensions
• 2+ million downloads

The Cons

This is a set up in terms of code from any other package that I have seen. Magento is much more advanced and generally requires a more advanced developer to really take advantage of all that Magento has to offer. And on a average server sites can appear to be slow. Support on the forums can also be a little scarce at times.

However that does not mean that less experienced developers cannot start using Magento.

Getting Started

Check out my video tutorial on installing Magento on Nettuts. This goes over most of the fundamentals of installing Magento and the basic functions such as product addition, adding categories and so on.

If you would rather jump in right now then go to http://www.magentocommerce.com/download and download a copy!

Conclusion

Just to sum up I think that Magento is a great system for developers and now is the time to jump on board. Despite a few little cons that I mentioned above the system is great and works really well.

I’d love to hear if you have ever worked with Magento and what your experience was like!

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