Magento

Excellent! Quick question though: how will shipping work when dealing with multiple ship-to addresses? Can different shipping methods be used per address?

Jonah - YES. A user can select a shipping method per address, based on the available methods on the site.

You say you can pick a location for each individual item, but are you able to buy 5 of one item and then split them between addresses too? Or would you need to add those 5 products to the cart individually?

Ryan - yes. You’ll be able to purchase and split an item with a quantity of 5 (per your example). There is no need to individually add each item to cart. Hope this makes sense.

Roy

How modular will the payment methods be (Authorize.net, paypal, etc)?  Will you have any general approaches for handling taxes?  Will it be possible to have category discounts as well as individual product discounts?  Can products have different prices in a situation where a user type, for example, is wholesale or retail?  can products have product options where each product option can have its stock level managed individually?  how easy will it be for an admin level user to place orders which could, for example, be received over the phone?… and.. yeah, I could probably think of a lot more questions.  Thanks

great great feature!!

Clayton - wow, that’s a lot to handle. Let’s get started ...

payment methods - we will make an announcement shortly regarding out-of-the-box payment gateways. I can confirm that authorize.net, verisign, paypal, and google chekout are all included.

taxes - fully supported

promotions and specials - very extensive module that is currently under development. This will be an exciting topic for the Magento community and will support category/product level discounts.

wholesale/retail - supported as part of pricing groups.

product options - stock will be supported per variant (attribute/option combination)

admin order entry - more information will be available soon in regards to this feature.

Let me know if anything else comes to mind

Available shipping integration?
Gift certificates?
Search capabilities? (Lucene?)
Different images on product options?
Is the category structure using the preorder tree traversal algorithm?
Are there product packages?  Meaning, can I create a product that can contain a group of other products/product options? An example product package would contain 2 medium shirts and 1 hat.
Will it require MySQL 4/5, or Postgresql?
Product import / export? (whether XML/comma delimited/etc.)
RSS feeds on categories/all products?
Import from crappy systems such as zen cart/cubecart/whatever?

Hi - slightly o/t but I have a question about stock in Magento…

Will it be a straight single field for the amount of stock on hand or will it be a more complete inventory system allowing you to add a new batch of product and this update the overall level.

It would be perfect if it was the latter and you could assign a different cost price to a batch - this would make the (hopefully included!) reported functionality really accurate.

Can’t wait for this - we’re looking at dumping an established and closed source system to move to Magento… keep the teasers coming!

Yes, please can we have a ZenCart importer!

Clayton - here goes:

Available shipping integration - I expect for UPS, Fedex, USPS, and DHL to be available

Gift certificates - yes. It’s part of the roadmap (which will be published soon). Probably not in the early upcoming release.

Search capabilities (Lucene?) - Also part of roadmap (including Lucene)

Different images on product options? - Supported out of the box.

Is the category structure using the preorder tree traversal algorithm? Not sure about this one.

Are there product packages? Meaning, can I create a product that can contain a group of other products/product options? An example product package would contain 2 medium shirts and 1 hat. - We refer to those as bundles. It is part of the roadmap and not expected in the early release of the product.

Will it require MySQL 4/5, or Postgresql? - Magento is database independent. We will have more technical specs shortly.

Product import / export? (whether XML/comma delimited/etc.) - yes. supported.

RSS feeds on categories/all products? - yes. Part of the roadmap

Import from crappy systems such as zen cart/cubecart/whatever? - Yes. Again, probably not intially, but we’ve discussed it and expect to have import engines for a number of the leading ecommerce systems.

I just keep getting more and more excited about the release of Magneto! How much longer will you make us wait in agony as we fight with the Ecommerce programs we now use?

Mark - very (very soon). Look for a new site with more information within the next two weeks ... and believe me, I feel your pain with the current open source products on the market. We are just as excited as you are to launch the product. Stay tuned.

Roy

Will it be possible to add support for additional payment gateways from launch using some sort of plug in architecture?  We have many weird and wonderful payment systems in the UK…

Simon - absolutely! This is fully supported. With the help of the community, we expect to have a significant amount of gateways supported over time.

Hi,

This package is looking great! How about multiple currency support and i18n (multiple languages support), both for the front end and backend?

I can help with translation to Spanish.

Thanks, and great work!

Carlos - multi-lingual / currency support is in the works and part of the roadmap

Hi Roy

I’ve got a few more for you… specifically:

1.  Any possibility of multiple storefronts feeding in to one back end for processing?

2.  Will the URLs be ‘search engine friendly’?

3.  Will it be possible to add custom attributes for products and then to search based on these?

4.  Will the back end system including sales reporting functionality?

5.  As per comment #9, how will stock be handled by the system?

Apologies for all of the questions!

Simon

Simon - answers below:

1.Any possibility of multiple storefronts feeding in to one back end for processing? - YES. This is in the works and part of the roadmap.

2. Will the URLs be ’search engine friendly’? - Absolutely - YES.

3. Will it be possible to add custom attributes for products and then to search based on these? - I believe this is included as well (or a derivative of).

4. Will the back end system including sales reporting functionality? - Certainly - yes.

5. As per comment #9, how will stock be handled by the system? - We’ll have more information detailed in upcoming posts.

I have never seen an upcoming product where so many questions get the answer ‘YES’!

This could be an interesting summer.

You are asking all the right questions Keep ‘em coming.

Being able to order products that are in digital in nature?
Documentation? (either generated from comments or actual documentation)
Unit testing?
Installation wizard?
Upgrade wizard (for db adjustments mainly, similar to vbulletin’s approach)?
Templating system (if applicable)?
What other things are you going to do to build hype prior to the release?

Will there be an option to hide a product and/or category to only be viewed by a select group? If so, will it be done by sending them a link or assign some sort of user level that allows access to special products not seen by those without an account or permission?

This all sounds so good I can’t wait to jump in!

Clayton -

Being able to order products that are in digital in nature? - YES, in the works and part of the roadmap for a future release.

Documentation? (either generated from comments or actual documentation) - this is a very important area for us. We expect (over time) to have significant documentation for all facets of the platform with the community’s help.

Unit testing? - in the works.

Installation wizard? - yes.

Upgrade wizard (for db adjustments mainly, similar to vbulletin’s approach)? - This is certainly planned and part of the roadmap.

Templating system (if applicable)? - you can use any template system you wish (no restrictions by Magento). In other words, Smarty/Savant2/anything else.

What other things are you going to do to build hype prior to the release? - not much. Seems to work as is

Ben - I don’t believe this will be available out of the box. There may be some workarounds and you can always choose to customize the code based on your requirements.

Why hasn’t the license been stated yet?
Will there be any licensing restrictions for commercial use?
Is there a ‘real’ plugin system or will any extensibility be more based on helpers / extendable classes?
Is it using Zend_Db_Select for the database independence?

Why hasn’t the license been stated yet? - The license will be posted soon.

Will there be any licensing restrictions for commercial use? - Not at all. You will be able to use the product for commercial purposes.

Is there a ‘real’ plugin system or will any extensibility be more based on helpers / extendable classes? - more information will be posted soon in regards to the architecture.

Is it using Zend_Db_Select for the database independence? - I’ll let the tech guys answer this one in future posts.

Wow, this sure looks promising. Can you elaborate on any of the following:

1) Product promotion (upsells / crossells)? Will they be part of this product?

2) Digital products and download capabilities?

3) Complex product attributes? Like clothing for a simple example. Can we designate an n-tier attribute structure as in-stock / out of stock? For example: clothing is usually 2 tier structure - color, and size. But can also be more (color, size, neck, sleeve, etc). Will there be an ability to handle complex n-tier attributes and possibly offer pricing based on those combinations specifically? I’ve found that this is often the single most difficult thing to integrate into an e-commerce platform.

1) Product promotion (upsells / crossells)? Will they be part of this product? - Yes. Merchandising will be supported.

2) Digital products and download capabilities? - Yes. This is part of the roadmap.

3) Complex product attributes? Like clothing for a simple example. Can we designate an n-tier attribute structure as in-stock / out of stock? For example: clothing is usually 2 tier structure - color, and size. But can also be more (color, size, neck, sleeve, etc). Will there be an ability to handle complex n-tier attributes and possibly offer pricing based on those combinations specifically? I’ve found that this is often the single most difficult thing to integrate into an e-commerce platform. - This is fully supported, absolutely.

Magento sounds like a delicious ice cream sunday on a hot summer’s day.

Impressive. I would think that would be a first in e-commerce platforms (n-tier attributes).

I just realized that I read your name wrong - here I was thinking “Magneto” like in X-men, not “Magento”. Cool still, but not quite as geeky

A couple of thoughts on integration w/other systems:

* An API to integrate this with other sites/systems would be fabulous
* A Drupal Integration Module, specifically, would be most excellent.

libsys - an API is part of the roadmap. Drupal integration is something we are very interested in and plan to develop it some time in the future.

Hello,

Header tag is supported on category and products ?

Could i imported my oscommerce database (customers, orders, history and maybe points and rewards :o) ?

My apologies for my bad english.

Allande - Meta Tags will be supported on a category and product level. In the future, we expect to have import engines for many eCommerce systems, including osCommerce.

Roy, when you mean “road map”, this means, when launched, X months after released, or x years?

Diego - The roadmap includes a list of features broken down by release schedule. Our roadmap is currently in terms of months (not years) with the largest subset of features to be released initially. We will publish the roadmap very soon so you see can when certain features can be expected.

Magento is too good to be true! Keep rocking.

I’m pumped that you guys are using the Zend Framework behind this.  Let me guess - you guys are waiting on the 1.0 stable release of Zend Framework (expected within a matter of weeks) before launching this baby? Oh how I can’t wait!

Magento will give major hype to the Zend Framework and the community will love you for that! Keep up the awesome work

Hey Roy,
What are the levels of customization like for invoices/labels?

Will we have full out control on the design and layouts?

Thanks.

Travis - Magento is open source and you have have complete flexibility to customize the invoice and labels whichever way you like. You will have full control of the layout given its’ template driven architecture.

This all sounds excellent… What about dropshipping though...? Can products be associated with a vendor for fulfilment purposes?

Jake - dropshipping is currently not on the roadmap. We will certainly consider this feature for future releases.

Will magento come with a default front end template or just the blocks to drop in? I suppose im asking if you get a full working front end ready to upload?

Will there be somewhere to submit themes?

Digital downloads would be a great feature to have! I’m currently looking for a download store to implement for a record label, but it’s almost impossible to find (it’s hard to find a good opensource shop, let alone one that supports digital downloads).

I’m looking forward to Magento

Matt - yes. A default front-end will be provided. We also expect to have multiple themes contributed by the community to choose from.

Rogier - digital downloads will be supported and are on the roadmap.

How about multiple downloads on single product? I mean if I have mp3 album as a product - could there be possibility to sell single songs also in same product page?

lerva - good point. I’ll pass this on to our development team. Thank you for the the comment.

I think it’s less than a week to go before launch. Are you guys still on target?

Ethan - a firm date has not been set. I can say that Magento’s first release will be within 30-60 days. Check back next week for a new site and much more information about what’s to come.

Thanks for quick reply, I hope to hear more about that issue.

One more question - there is one special contribution in oscommerce, which is for me very important: Customer products.

That means anyone could insert new products and edit own products too. Admin then approves new products.

I assume that this is not something that is available out of the box - but would it be difficult to implement? What kind of user pages Magento has by default?

lerva - I checked in with our development team, and the multiple downloads is a feature that will be supported and has been planned (once virtual goods are available). In regards to your second question, such functionality is currently not on the roadmap.

I am not sure what you mean by user pages - can you elaborate?

With user pages I mean just normal “My Account” page, where customer can check order status, chance account details, download virtual goods etc. You have all these functionalities planned, right?

I’m intrested about them, because our shop is also active community - and that is one reason why we are interested in changing from oscommerce to another platform.

So we will have user pages and also public profile for each user, where customer can add images, text, favourites and so on. And these features are controlled by every user from their account.

Lerva - yes. My account pages are certainly planned and include (not a complete list): account information, orders, wishlists, tags, orders, addresses, virtual goods, newsletters.

A public profile is currently not on the roadmap. You can certainly extend Magento and develop such functionality.

Sounds great.

The reason why we love free open source software to commercial is that community creates so much good for everyone. With money you get good shop platform, but when you need to extend and make it more custom - you need more money. I really hope that magento gets a really good community and lots of contributions. It looks like you guys at Varien do a lot of things right.

So we will be more than happy to contribute. I just need to get Magento soon, so we can test if it suits to our needs. We really can’t make any business plans to software that isn’t even released yet, but I certainly keep my eyes open for this one.

Can’t wait for your new site, first release and roadmap. Good luck!

Are you guys going to support tickets sales? Or, one step further, ticketing?

Michael - there is no direct support for ticket sales, but you can certainly sell tickets as a virtual item.

How will magento handle product options?

Also, will you be able to display product options as if they are in table rows and the customer can specify the quantity of any option and add the complete selection to the cart?

Steve - see my response (#7, #11) to the same question above.

Wow - you wouldn’t believe how excited I am about magento.

Quick question - will there be an affiliate module?

christina - a basic affiliate system is part of the roadmap - yes.

Terrific - thanks roy!

I second the request for more complex shipping / drop shipping capabilities!

Hi! Looking forward to Magento, but just a few queries:

- What will be the server requirements? Does it need apache mod rewrite for the search engine friendly url or will it also run on Zeus?
- How will the license work? For instance, will we be able to reskin the admin panel to suit our branding?
- We are looking to create an ‘online shopping mall’ where different suppliers can upload their products and the revenue will be shared using a percentage or flat fee. Will the be a feature for this in Magento?

Thanks!

Konrad

Hi Magento,

Magento began to be very well known in France… we are waiting the beta version !
I discovered with magento we can manage multiple stores in one place… it’s a really good news.
My suggestion will be to manage our ecommerce store and in a same time our ebay store. I think that will be a good reason for ebay user to create their own online shop.
See this website
http://www.auctionblox.com

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Will this handle 1 product in multiple categories? Our current cart handles this in admin section, in a field where we enter as many different category ID’s seperated by commas and the product appears in all those categories, will you be implementing a similar function?

Sam - a product can be in multiple categories, certainly.

*looks at calendar*

When is this supposed to be released again?

Roy,

As a merchant selling a small number of similar items that frequently get sent to mupltiple recipients on the basis of one purchase, I’m looking forward to seeing how multiple ship-to’s evolves.

There’s one usability nit that seems to have been carried over from your OSC implementations. You might want to consider adding a label or nickname field to addresses, as printing the entire name/address string makes the cart address pull-down lists hard to scan. It’s easier to pick from a list that has “Grandma Charlotte” and “Grandma Myra” than it is from a list with the actual addresses."Uncle Ted - Reno” vs. “Uncle Ted - at the lake house” would bury critical info in the middle of your long pull-down line if full addresses we’re used. (And using labels simply removes text clutter from your page.)

Going further with the nickname idea would be nice, allowing a customer to specify the recipient from the nickname list at the point they add something to their cart, rather than forcing them to click a multiple-destination button at some future point in the process. If I order a red sweater for Grandma C and a blue one for Grandma M, I figure out the colors for each when I choose them. By making me wait to record the address bindings until I actually see the cart page, you force me to think through my choices twice. That frustration will cause dropped carts.

Both LL Bean and Lands End have some nice tweaks to their multiple ship-to functionality. One thing they do, especially Bean, is to make the process as stateless as possible. When I tried the Magento demo, I added two items to my cart, used the guest option to start check-out, and then went back to add individual addresses. At that point, I was forced into registered check-out. By forcing my path to conform to your data model (which seems not to want to store more complex address info for guests) you’ve sacrificed usability for (hidden and uninteresting to a shopper) architecture at that point.

(And all this is much easier to describe than it is to deal with the resulting implementation complexity!

$.02

Nice work so far!

rick

As far as I can tell, Magento, on multi-address orders, creates separate order #’s for each address. Is it possible to utilize 1 order number for mult-address orders?

@batkins: No, as those orders can be handled, edited, canceled, invoiced and shipped separately.

I apologize if this has been addressed, but I did not see it. We sell courseware books. It is common for training companies to order multiples of the same book to be shipped to multiple addresses. We thought that Magento was perfect for us, but most of the multiple orders are being rejected by Authorize net because each ship to address is being sent as a separate transaction. This leads triggers an anti-theft situation which causes the orders to be rejected.

Any thoughts on how this can be handled?