Convenience for your customers should be a paramount priority for any eCommerce retailer. That's why Magento includes Multiple Ship-To functionality right out of the box, helping avoid the frustration that can occur when a customer is shopping for multiple people at one time. Instead of forcing them to place multiple transactions, they can quickly and easily ship to multiple addresses with one order. This can be especially useful around the holidays, when more and more people are doing their primary holiday shopping online.

Here's how it works:

• As a customer is in their shopping cart, they simply select "One Address" or "Multiple Addresses" before proceeding to a check-out page.
• Selecting "Multiple Shipping" allows them to select a shipping address for each individual item.
• Once they've entered a location once, it becomes available for all other items in the order as well in the account's address book for any future transactions.
• Each address is then organized for you as separate orders, keeping your fulfillment system uncluttered.

It's just one less reason for your customers to leave your store frustrated, and one more reason for them to come back again and again.

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

When is this supposed to be released again?

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

- 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

Quick question - will there be an affiliate module?

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?

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!

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

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.

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

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?

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

I’m looking forward to Magento

Will there be somewhere to submit themes?

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

Thanks.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

This could be an interesting summer.

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’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

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!

Roy

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.

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!

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

Roy