Definition:
Magento is an “Open Source” platform, totally free (not so its implementation) for the creation, administration and analysis of electronic commerce or e-commerce. Created in 2007 by the American company Varien, it covers all the aspects necessary for the management of an online commerce.
Along with WooCommerce and Prestashop, Magento is one of the most widely used e-commerce platforms worldwide. WooCommerce, on the other hand, is a WordPress extension that allows users to easily transform their sites into online stores. While WooCommerce is ideal for small and medium-sized businesses due to its ease of use and flexibility, Magento is more suitable for larger projects due to its ability to handle extensive product catalogs and its high level of customization.
Origin and evolution of Magento
Magento was developed in 2007 by Varien, Inc. a Los Angeles-based company founded by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. The platform was conceived to offer a flexible and robust e-commerce solution, capable of meeting the diverse needs of companies of different sizes. In March 2008, the first official version of Magento was released, highlighted by its modular architecture and its ability to be highly customizable, allowing developers to tailor the platform to the specific needs of their customers. The main milestones in the evolution of Magento are:
- 2010: Varien changed its name to Magento, Inc. and received a significant investment from eBay, which accelerated its development and expansion.
- 2011: eBay acquired a majority stake in Magento, Inc. integrating the platform into its e-commerce ecosystem.
- 2015: Magento spun off from eBay and became an independent company with the backing of private equity firm Permira.
- 2015: Launch of Magento 2.0, a complete rewrite of the platform that improved performance, security and usability.
- 2018 – Adobe Systems acquired Magento for approximately $1.68 billion, integrating it into Adobe Experience Cloud to strengthen its marketing and analytics tools offering.
Magento Features and Functionalities
Undoubtedly, the infinite possibilities offered by what has placed it as a market leader for ecommerce managers, with hundreds of thousands of users around the world. Some of the most outstanding are:
- Open Source:Magento incorporates an open source software, Magento Open Source, which allows anyone to modify it, implementing multiple functionalities through plug-ins.
- Appearance: Magento allows us to make a fully customizable design for our e-commerce which is undoubtedly a very important factor when it comes to differentiating between different online stores. Thanks to the content management system(CMS) we can edit at will the appearance of it. If desired, templates made by third parties are included that serve as the basis for starting to design our store. Another outstanding option within this section is that its designs are responsive and therefore adapt to any type of device.
- SEO:this platform is conceived from its origins so that the businesses we design have a good positioning in search engines, also including tools to increase the traffic of our website, such as customizable URLs, meta tags or Google Sitemap.
- Payments: Magento allows you to install the most important payment management add-ons such as Square, Amazon Pay or Paypal, integrate payment by credit card, checks and money orders, etc…
- Security:the user is largely responsible for installing security certificates, apart from Magento regularly releases patches and allows compliance with security standards in electronic payments.
- Integrations:one of the features that most pleases users is the possibility of installing all kinds of applications and add-ons from multiple developers, free and paid, so that the possibilities of our trade become almost unlimited.