Magento

The Magento Enterprise Edition is a powerful eCommerce platform with features designed to increase sales.

Keep your customers coming back by offering store credits and gift cards. Offer physical gift cards sent in the mail and virtual gift cards sent to an inbox. Set price tiers for customers to choose, or let them enter an amount within a preset minimum and a maximum value. The Enterprise Edition gives you control to define the card lifetime and enable gift messages so customers can add a personal touch.

Recipient’s can check their card balance before checkout, and use the available funds for purchase. Use an unlimited number of gift cards, or redeem and receive store credit. The Enterprise Edition keeps a gift card history so that you can see how gift cards are being used.

Reward loyal customers and handle returns by issuing store credits so customers can use the balance for future orders.  During the refund process, simply select the full refund amount, or enter a partial amount to create an automatic store credit. Your customers can choose to use their store credit during checkout along with other available payment methods. The Enterprise Edition makes it easy.

The Magento Enterprise Edition, giving you the tools to grow your business.

It’s been a great last few weeks here with lots of planning for the future taking place. I appreciate everyone who replied to my thread and/or emailed me about the key infrastructure changes will be taking place soon.  It is only due to your valuable feedback that we can help ensure that we continue to grow in the right direction.

Direction and focus are two very important necessities when it comes to accomplishing anything.  They help drive goals and they help instill purpose.  In many of my exchanges with community members, many have shown great enthusiasm and tremendous desire to help shape future editions of Magento Community Edition.  To be honest, I am bit humbled by the colossal appetite that community members continue to inspire me with and to that end I would like to announce the opening of our feature roadmap.

Roadmap. By The Community, For the Community

Currently the roadmap is mainly developed by us with input from the community while taking broad overall goals in consideration.  While we work hard to make everyone happy we do ultimately need to achieve a balance which will help Magento advance all around.  As the project gets healthier and more intricate, we find that the scope is ever increasing and would like to open up the roadmap to ensure that everyone continues to have equal opportunity to define the future flow.  To enable that, we will be transferring the development of the roadmap to the Community Advisory Board.  Through their direct involvement with the community the CAB will be able manage and supervise the roadmap more efficiently, more openly and more cordially.

The Community Advisory Board will be meeting some time within the next two weeks to discuss this and issues related to infrastructure changes.  We are currently trying to sync schedules for the meeting and some members are on holiday and we will have more information when we set a date and time.  We are always working to open doors for the community and give the community a greater ability to influence the path which Magento travels as it continues to flourish into the world’s greatest, most comprehensive and coolest eCommerce platform.

Until then please feel free to email myself, at oz@varien.com or any of the other CAB Members with questions and/or comments.  The future is looking brighter and brighter and my guess its not only because the summer is rolling in!

Koby

Magento Enterprise Partner Visions and Roy Rubin, Founder and CEO of Varien, will represent the open source e-commerce movement at this year’s Mail Order World fair (Hall 9, booth 900). Alexander Ringsdorff, Visions’ CEO, and Roy Rubin are available for appointments with interested retailers on 30th September, the first day of the exhibition.

Mail Order World takes place in Wiesbaden, Germany, from 30th September to 1st October. More than 90 speakers, 370 exhibitors, 1200 distance sellers and service providers and 4800 visitors in attendance make Mail Order World the largest trade fair of the European distance selling industry. At Visions’ booth, interested retailers will be able to learn more about the opportunities of e-commerce with Magento.

In addition to successful enterprises abroad, Magento already has a strong presence in the German e-commerce market: Jack Wolfskin and Globetrotter Ausrüstung - named Distance Seller of the Year at Mail Order World 2006 – already trust in Magento.

The e-commerce agency Visions, based in Hannover, has specialised in implementing Magento according to the needs of multi-channel retailers and draws on extensive experience with highly customised solutions.

Discounteo.com is one of the largest eCommerce sites in the French market and recently launched on Magento in March, 2009. Developed by SQLi, a Magento Enterprise Partner, Discounteo.com has made a positive assessment of the migration to Magento, as mentioned in a recent blog post on the SQLi Communiqués Blog (French):

SQLI and Discounteo - A Common Focus for Innovation

To expand its business, Discounteo, specializing in online sales of home electronics wanted to deploy an eCommerce platform that could meet strong performance expectations ... Daniel Broche, President of Discounteo, was one of the first french eCommerce leaders to have made the choice of Magento in the spring of 2008 ...

“Following the decision to relaunch our online platform, we have discussed various proposals, both proprietary software and open source. The SQLi team has been particularly convincing in their technological and functional solution with Magento, and also by their professionalism and ability to anticipate our needs.
The proposed solution by SQLI fully met our requirements (integration with an ecosystem of applications, e-commerce features dedicated to our products, performance ...). Moreover, SQLi is very sensitive to our desire to innovate and expand the project in this capacity. For example, we are among the first to have introduced a conversation on our site, and are innovating in terms of CRM, logistics, etc. ... Open Source is an important driver because it can be less restricted than proprietary technologies”

Magento and SQLi - The Promise of Open Source

The work to implement the new Discounteo.com provided the opportunity to create software extensions adding to the ecosystem of the Magento platform. Some of these extensions (ones of a generic nature), are now available through Magento Connect (SQLi Dashboard, SQLi Range Filters). Thus, with its successes in the development of e-commerce sites, SQLI continues to invest and contribute in next-generation platform, Magento.

Post loosely translated using Google Translate

The wonderful folks at Practical eCommerce have made available a free guide for online merchants that are getting started online, “Getting Started in eCommerce - An overview to selling products online”. The guide is a great resource and provides an overview of payment processing, merchandising, marketplaces, email marketing and more.

Check it out for yourself!

The Magento Enterprise Edition Subscription is the premium grade Magento Product offering powerful tools to help grow your business.

One of the most valuable Enterprise Edition features is the ability to create, edit, and test new store content on a Staging web site. The live store remains untouched and customers can keep shopping while you update the site and develop new exciting content. Create new marketing campaigns, update your product catalog, test new designs, and enable new features in a safe environment separate from your live business.

Add a new staging site through an easy to use interface by simply selecting the site you would like to duplicate. The ability to select specific content areas to be duplicated gives added control and flexibility. Create multiple staging sites and save time by working on different data areas at once. When the content is ready, it is merged to the main staging site to be taken live.

The privacy of your staging site is important and The Magento Enterprise Edition gives you the option to password protect your staging environments. Each staging site will keep a history of all actions so that you can keep track of who did what, when and why.

When you’re ready to take your changes live, you can merge to the original site, or choose another Magento website in your installation.

Select a manual merge, or schedule the merge to occur automatically at a later date. Additionally, The Enterprise Edition let’s you take different elements live at different times so you don’t have to wait to provide site updates to your customers.

And, if you ever need to revert back, you can roll back your entire store, or just the needed elements, to a previous state.

The Magento Enterprise Edition Subscription, providing the features you want with the flexibility you need.

Magento 1.3 Theme Design book will be released in July, 2009 by Packt Publishing. More information is available below and on Packt’s website.

Customize the appearance of your Magento e-commerce store with Magento’s powerful theming engine

* Give your Magento stores a unique branded look and feel by creating your own Magento themes
* Use design techniques to reinforce your brand message and increase sales
* Customise your Magento theme’s look, feel, layout, and features
* Promote and improve your Magento store with the use of social media such as Twitter, social bookmarks, and so on
* Ideas and examples for defining a good print stylesheet
* Packed with essential hints and tips for effective Magento web design