I’ve been looking around for a while for an e-commerce solution for one of my other sites and during my travels I came across Magento
Although the final stable version is not yet released the promise is that it will be available by the end of March 2008. There is also a downloadable preview version which allows you to mess around with it and see what you think, both front and back end.
Personally I think it is very user friendly, although I admit that I’m no programmer so unless I learn code over night I’ll be waiting for a few templates and help files to come along. That said, with it being opensource there is already a community forming and lots of help being offered.
The only downside I can see at the moment is the lack of integration for downloadable products, mp3s for example and potentially this could lose a reasonable number of adopters to the platform - I for one need the ability to add downloads as a product and there are no doubt lots of users out there that would require the same. I hope this is included in the final production ready version or at least gets implemented very quickly.
Overall it offers a lot of control (setting up discounts and promotions is a breeze), aesthetically it looks very professional and I think it is going to seriously rock the e-commerce boat.
2 Comments
So if you can set me up an e-commerce site to sell my songs, I’ll give you a commission.
Hey McDuff,
Magento has now come out of Beta into live version 1.0. I’ll be posting about it soon.
V.1.0 hasn’t added the download capability if that’s what you’re looking for but it is promised very soon.
Either way I’m not the guy to set this up for you but there are plenty of contenders over at the Magento community.