Blog

Posted by dani cass on August 25th, 2011

What is Magento?

Magento is an open source, feature rich, ecommerce platform. Open source software is software that allows others to access the code it is written in so that they can change and modify the code to further extend and develop the functionality available.

Because Magento allow access to their code, there is an ever increasing store of extensions available allowing you to add all kinds of additional features to your Magento website, giving you flexibility with the look, content and functionality.

Magento also features a robust backend giving you access to various reports to assist with marketing, search engine optimisation and catalogue management.

Can Magento be customised or am I restricted to premade templates and set functionality?

Magento can be fully customised, from templates and design; to the functionality for both the website owners and customers. Magento have thousands of extensions to choose from so you can create a website tailored to your specific requirements.

As well as the vast sea of Magento website templates and extensions that are available, you can also choose for your Magento web designer to design a custom template in keeping with your companies’ branding or for your Magento web developer to create an extension to perform a specific function if one isn’t currently available.

What payment gateways are compatible with Magento?

Magento websites are compatible with all major payment methods including PayPoint, PayPal, Protx and Worldpay.

What are the benefits to my customers of having a website built using the Magento Commerce platform?

Magento ecommerce websites allow for a lot of customer focused functionality.

One of the main advantages of having your website built in the Magento platform is that you can create clean, easy to navigate websites that encourage sales. Magento commerce websites can include functionality such as previously browsed items, similar items and recommended items as well as wish lists, favourite lists, side by side item comparisons, single page checkouts with guest checkout option and much, much more.

Magento websites let your customers browse for, and purchase items quickly and easily.

I’m using social networking to promote my business, what does Magento do to support this?

Magento have a growing selection of social networking extensions to assist your websites online marketing. There are extensions that allow you to add your websites products directly on to your Facebook fan page, to follow your company on social networking sites without even clicking away from your website and to easily share your pages via social networking and bookmarking sites.

What should I do to ensure that Magento websites cover all of my companies’ needs?

Before meeting with your Magento web designer, we suggest making a list of exactly what you want your online store to do for both your company and your customers, it is also good if you can write down your goals for the website, this way your Magento web designer will be able to recommend the best functionality and may even suggest things you hadn’t considered.

Where can I view examples of live Magento websites designed and developed by Impact Web Solutions?

You can view live Magento websites created by Impact Web Solutions by clicking on the links below. These examples will give you a better idea of the flexibility provided by developing ecommerce websites on the Magento platform. You will see that the layouts and designs are very different for each website and that the functionality also varies from site to site depending on the clients requirements.

Window wallpaper http://www.windowwallpaper.co.uk/

Palmer Metals http://www.palmermetals.co.uk/

Metro Furniture http://metrofurniture.co.uk/

G-Force http://gforcesportswear.co.uk/

Pineapple Shoes https://www.pineappleshoes.com/

Dani
Impact Web Solutions
Magento Web Design