Magento Go Platform Enters Beta - Magento Apps Coming Soon
Thousands of merchants from around the world
Earlier this year at Magento’s inaugural Imagine eCommerce Conference in Los Angeles, we announced Magento Go and the Magento Go Platform. Launched in February, Magento Go is Magento’s new hosted, SaaS eCommerce solution for small and emerging merchants who want the benefits of selling online, without the complexity of managing servers and software. It provides them with a robust platform at a cost that any small business can afford. Since its launch just a few weeks ago, thousands of merchants from around the world have signed up to open online store.
The secret sauce to Magento’s success and popularity is its extensibility and its vibrant developer community. Third-party developers have created close to 4,000 Magento extensions that merchants can deploy to their Magento Enterprise, Professional and Community Edition platforms to add functionality, customize and integrate their online stores. We knew that in order for Magento Go to be successful, we needed to empower the community to extend Magento Go as well.
That’s why when we announced Magento Go at Imagine, we also announced the Magento Go Platform, a platform as a service that provides developers the ability to build, host and deploy custom apps for Magento Go. SaaS solutions bring ease of use but usually at the expense of flexibility. Typically, you’re stuck with a few color options to toggle or some labels you can update. If there are APIs, they are hard to learn or integrate. Want to enhance or change the UI? Not likely. With the Magento Go Platform, we have a simple vision: empower developers in the cloud so they can enrich the experiences for merchants.
Open standards and security
To fuel our vision, we turned to Open Standards. OpenSocial, a standard that has its roots in Social Networking, is a mature technology that has been adopted by Enterprise companies such as IBM, Jive, Atlassian & Google. Using it as a foundation, we created an API solution that is approachable and simple. Magento Go Platform has a logical and consistent JavaScript & REST API, providing a myriad of implmenetation possibilities. But don't be fooled by their simplicity; the Magento Go Platform APIs have an impressive level of coverage. They follow the mantra, "if it can be done in the UI, it can be done via the API." We've also integrated technologies to keep everyone secure - OAuth & Caja. Both keep users protected, whether they are on a Go store or in a 3rd-party integration.
Apps anyway you like
The core concept for Magento Go Platform is Apps. Apps mean a few things in Magento Go, but most importantly it is *the* way to add new functionality to Magento Go. An App can be added to a merchant store. An example would be an App that displays new products on the homepage. Apps can also be in the admin - such as a CRM dashboard. Apps can also leverage other APIs to create powerful mashups. Apps can even exist outside a store, integrating with other services across the web and mobile. But what's truly groundbreaking is that a single App can take advantage of all four - being in the Frontend, the Admin, mashing up services and integrating across the web and mobile.
Closed Beta Now Starting
At Imagine we invited developers to apply to the Magento Go Platform beta program. We received hundreds of applications from current and prospective Magento developers. From these applicants we’ve selected a handful of developers to participate in a closed beta program that started this week.
What does this mean for merchants using Magento Go? Soon they will be able to easily extend and customize their Magento Go online stores by selecting and installing apps from a catalog with a single click.
Stay tuned for more updates about the Magento Go platform and apps for Magento Go.