Why Open Source Magento E-commerce?

By Author: Jessica Brien
Total Articles: 16
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Magento is a new professional open-source eCommerce solution offering unprecedented flexibility and control.
Magento was designed with the notion that each eCommerce implementation has to be unique since no two businesses are alike. Magento’s modular architecture puts the control back in the hands of the online merchant and places no constraints on business processes and flow.
Magento is available on GPL (General Public Licence)

“Open source is a set of principles and practices on how to write software, the most important of which is that the source code is openly available”
The free software movement was launched in 1983. In 1998, a group of individuals advocated that the term free software be replaced by open source software (OSS) as an expression which is less ambiguous and more comfortable for the corporate world. Software developers may want to publish their software with an open source license, so that anybody may also develop the same software or understand how it works.

New In Magento
* Flexible Coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time ...
... period, products, and categories. For example: Percent Discount | Fixed Amount Discount | Free Shipping | Buy x, get y free. | Buy x, get y with percent or fixed amount discount | Buy x, get free shipping on order | Buy x, get percent discount | Buy x, get fixed amount discount.
* Catalog Promotional Pricing by percentage or fixed amount with ability to restrict to stores, categories, products
* Free Shipping Option
* Multi-Tier Pricing for quantity discounts
* Customer Group-specific pricing and group-specific tier pricing
* Landing Page Tool for Campaigns
* Search Engine Friendly URL’s
* URL Rewrites
* Recently Viewed Products
* Recently Compared Items
* New Items Promotional Tool
* Up-sells in Shopping Cart
* Cross-sells on product pages
* Send to a Friend for all visitors, or registered users only
* Send Wishlist to a Friend by Email or RSS
* RSS Feeds for New Products, New Specials and New Tags
* Auto-generated Site Map
* Google Site Map
* Polls
* Newsletter Management

Site Management :

* Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with ability to share as much or as little information as needed
* Multi-Lingual
* Support for localization
* Support for multiple currencies
* Administration Permission System Roles and Users
* Flexible tax rate management with support for US and International markets
* Fully 100% customizable design using templates
* Customer Groups
* One-Click Upgrades
* Content Management System for Informational Pages

Popular Open source Software:

Oscommerce – Ecommerce Application
Zen Cart — Ecommerce Application
Joomla — Content Management System
TYPO3 — Enterprise Level Content Management System
X-Cart — Ecommerce Application
Cs-Cart — Ecommerce Application
Wordpress – Blog System
phpBB – Discussion Forum
Drupal - Content Management System
Moodle – Learning Management System
phpNuke – Content Management Portal
mambo – Content Management Portal