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Magento is functionality rich and one of the most customizable shopping cart solution ever. It is really amazing solution for your online business. No matter what you are selling or what service you are offering, Magento platform will bring to your business new wave and will help you to sell more and more. Magento out of the box have lots of nice and powerful features that make it one of the best e-commerce platforms.
There are more than 4,000 Magento paid and free extensions
There are 3 Magento editions:
- Community edition is absolutely free. You can download it from Magento official website, setup it on your host and launch your shop.
- Professional Edition starts at $2,995 per year. It differs from community edition by the following features:
1) PCI Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) Compliant
2) Reward Points System
3) Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
4) Strong Data Encryption
5) Customer Store Credits
You can purchase it at Magento official website.
- Enterprise Edition starts at $12,990 per year license.It has many extra features. The key features are:
1) CMS+ (Enhanced Content Management System)
2) Private (Club) Sales including Events, Invitations and Site access permissions
3) Highly Tuned Page Performance with Full Page Caching
Thus, these 3 Magento editions gives you full control on what you need.
No doubt, that Magento E-commerce engine by default is not perfect platform and has issues or disadvantages. But there are more than 4,000 free and paid Magento modules which changes these problems and improves Magento’s disadvantages. Magento extensions have been become Magento part.
Magento Extensions
More than 4,000 different modules are added to Magento Connect. It gives you tremendous opportunity to extend Magento standard functionality and offer your visitors really pleasant shopping. Below some extensions that are worth mentioning are described.
Starting your own online store you should be aware about Magento SEO optimization role. If you want to sell online, you need to be in search engine TOP to be found by your potential customers. It’s obvious thing. Magento is not good enough in regards of SEO. It has some lacks that won’t help you to raise to desired TOPs. There are some nice SEO modules which can fix these issues but one of them should be mentioned first.
MageWorx’ SEO Suite Enterprise extension for Magento platform. It really does what it’s written in its description. It fixes almost all Magento default SEO problems and transforms your site into well-optimized and as a result well-ranked store. This module solves duplicate content problem by using canonical tag. It also makes HTML sitemap totally seo and user friendly. It brings some improvements to XML sitemap file. It transforms tags, reviews, RSS fees and layered navigation URLs into seo-friendly URLs. Finally it allows creating product title and URL templates that gives you powerful control on your product pages and their promotion.
MageWorx’sFile Downloads & Product Attachments extension. This module is a must-have solution if you need to give your customers more information about what you are selling. If you want to upload manuals, instructions, license files or anything else you can do this in few steps with this extension. Each file can be assigned to any amount of products at once. File access can be restricted by customer groups.
MageWorx’s Store & Currency Auto Switcher. This solutions is the only available from magento extensions for automatic redirect to appropriate store based on visitor IP address. If you run multi-lanuage website most likely you want that german visitors go to German store, US visitors to US store, Europe – Europe store etc. Store & Currency Auto Switcher automatically determines your visitors/customers location and redirects to the store assigned to this location.
MageWorx’s Instant Cart Magento extension. This module doesn’t do too much but what it does is really really cool feature. When you add product to cart Magento redirects you directly to cart page and if you would like to add another product you need to go back. It’s really annoying. Instant Cart extension removed this redirect and replace it with AJAX Web 2.0 functionality. Thus, customers are not redirected to cart page and can add products to cart easily and instantly even from category page.