There's a new kid on the open source e-commerce block, and his name is Magento 1.0. It's not 'Magneto' like the comic book character, or magenta like the color; it's a totally new, made-up word, according to Roy Rubin, President of Varien Inc., the company that has devoted the last year to developing the new program. And the company claims it is going to shake up the open source commerce industry.

"New Open Source E-Commerce Platform that's Going to Change the Industry"

The Magento open source commerce program, distributed free under the OSL 3.0 license, was developed using all the tools that were not available to previous-generation open source e-commerce teams. The team generated 200,000 downloads of the beta program in a little over six months by using community-building to its fullest including forums, blogging, video, RSS feeds, newsletters, social networking sites such as Facebook and an uncanny ability to build a powerful mystique.

Magento is being released nine months later than originally promised — due in large part to the late release of the Zend Framework, a program on which it is based — and without a virtual products module to allow the sale and immediate download of software, music, ebooks etc. However, Rubin says downloadable products is at the top of their post-production list and will be added as soon as possible. An import tool is also planned for osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, and Cube Cart.

Comparison to Other Open Source Commerce Programs

Magento has done their research with the store customer and store owner in mind. As a result, their program has every feature that made osCommerce so popular, along with many of the features that made later open source ecommerce stores popular including CRE Loaded, Zen Cart and OSC-MAX.

In addition, Magento also has multiple advanced features found on million-dollar sites of large companies like Circuit City or Target. These features give customers the freedom to do on-the-fly decision-making about what product they want, zoom and pan on product images, perform product searches and get dynamic suggestions. Highlights of these revolutionary include:

What's Different for Magento Store Customers:

• Single-page checkout
• Multi-page checkout for multiple ship-to addresses
• Shopping cart includes product photo, name, price, quantity, remove and update
• Compare products across site
• Customized shopping and viewing preferences — grid view or list view
• Product search with on-the-fly auto-completion of search suggesting search terms and number of results below the search box as the customer types.
• Product filtering — view products by price, type, manufacturer, change dynamically by checking or unchecking boxes
• Product Tagging — user-generated keywords and phrases to categorize products. Each page has Add-a-Tag and a "Tag Cloud" displaying all tags associated with the product.
• Ajax product display with zoom, pan, and pop-up more views
• Tier pricing — rewards customers who purchase multiples of an item at a time.
• Search engine optimization, natural results, and "search engine friendly URLs" that use words instead of numbers
• Upsell products — suggest a higher-priced item
• My Account Dashboard — full featured customer accounts
• E-mail notification of new products in HTML or plain text

What's Different for Store Owners:

• One-click upgrades or automatic upgrades without affecting any customized content
• 100-percent customizable design using templates
• Control multiple Web sites and stores from one Administration Panel
• User-friendly Administration Panel Dashboard with top bar drop-down menus
• Email notifications templates for both HTML and plain text emails for new customer notifications, order confirmation, order update, lost password
• Newsletter module has subscription report, add and delete subscribers from Admin
• Product Picking list
• RSS new orders list
• Import tools planned for osCommerce, CRE Loaded, Zen Cart, Cube Cart.