Magento

I have run several eCommerce businesses in the past.  One of the biggest problems is dealing with an open source community, paying too much for a pay cart only to find out the pay cart is based on that open commerce one that you hate, and dealing with foreign languages.  In addition to that, they all template differently, and you have limited features and functionality.

Well, say GOODBYE to all of those problems!

Say hello to Magento Commerce.

Dan Root, Internet Entrepreneur

Having been selected as a ‘showoff’ startup, we’ll be showcasing Magento next week (January 16th) at Twiistup. This is a great opportunity to meet the Magento Team. Although the event is fully sold out, you can still win two tickets by donating to Kiva.org.

What is Twiistup?

Twiistup connects people from technology, media and entertainment. Held at a nightclub, our quarterly events feature several startups chosen to ‘showoff’ their products & services to influential bloggers, fellow tech-heads, investors, the media and those interested in learning about what’s hot in tech. An alternative to traditional networking events, Twiistup mixes it up with tunes, video, bites, beverages, prizes, swag and the unexpected.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Tell us a bit about yourself and ShoeBacca.com?

I formed Focus Media LLC about a year ago as a boutique development and SEO company. During that process, I was introduced to the owners of ShoeBacca.com as they had a substantial eBay presence but no web property of their own. We wanted to deliver a really fun different type of site with extremely cool advanced features. That led us to Magento.

What technologies are currently implemented / integrated in the frontend and behind-the-scenes?

First and foremost, I would like to give a huge thanks to Amanda Nelson from 7 Design Group for her amazing design. From the front-end the only additional technology is Adobe’s Scene7 image viewer. For the backend, we have employed Joomla for additional CMS control, and ServiceObjects for AMAZING address validation and address correction.

Why did you choose Magento for the project?

We were really attracted to the feature rich administration panel and Ajax product display. The closer for me personally was the seamless one page checkout which I love.

What other solutions did you consider and/or evaluate?

We looked at ZenCart as an alternative but found it lacking in too many areas. The only other option we considered was building our own shopping cart with virtually no features.

What are your plans for the future with the site?

Foremost is product development, throughout the beta process we will be adding youth products and apparel. We will also be taking advantage of the promotional capabilities in Magento. Lastly and most importantly, we will be running huge promotions and giving away a lot of shoes!

Any recommendations for people evaluating Magento?

As this site [ShoeBacca.com] is enterprise level, we are running 2 web servers with load balancing and a separate DB server. We saw tremendous increases in page load times when we moved the DB to a dedicated server. Of course anything you can do to increase caching is great.

Any final words of wisdom?

I would like to thank the entire Magento team for the hard work you all have done. This is clearly the cutting edge shopping cart system available. To sum it up in one word IMPRESSIVE. I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by a wonderful team of developers and designers and that is always the recipe for success!

If you are experiencing issues with the Magento PEAR channel at connect.magentocommerce.com, please note that the system is currently being updated. It should be up very shortly.

Stay tuned to this post for updates.

UPDATE (12:57 PST): Upgrade has been completed. Back to regular programming.

We’ve created two new screencasts in order to supplement the Magento Design Guide.

In the first screencast we will walk you through the setup of Magento’s interface and theme directory, as well as how you can go about creating and assigning a new theme to your store front.

The second screencast covers creating a website that caters to multiple languages through modifying and creating translation files, as well as creating new themes per language store.

Enjoy!

In an effort to continue to improve the Magento install and upgrade process on different environments and platforms, we’d like to build a community based team of alpha testers that will be able to provide us feedback. If you are interested, please complete the form and we’ll get in touch.

Thanks!

UPDATE: Registration is now closed. Thanks to the 75+ community members that volunteered. We’ll get in touch soon.

Magento is a feature rich eCommerce platform. If you had to make a quick pitch to a client, which top five Magento features would make the list?

Here are our favorites:

1. Layered Navigation
2. Multiple site control from a single admin interface
3. Multiple themes and design flexibility
4. Catalog and Shopping Cart price rules (Magento’s rule-based pricing system)
5. Checkout Process - single page checkout and multiple ship-to addresses functionality

We left out some great features from the (short) list such as upgradeability (ability to upgrade without losing customizations), call-center functionality (order creation/editing), Magento Connect (MC) and package/extension distribution through PEAR, amongst many more.

What are your favorites? Let us know in the comments.

I have been working with ecommerce software for quite sometime. I am very impressed with Magento. I believe it will become the de facto standard for open source e-commerce software ... it is so well done and does so many things right. I wanted to post a ‘congrats’ and ‘thank you’ to all responsible. I look forward to contributing what I can to this incredible project!

Quote from a recent Magento Forum post.