Introducing… Magento

Magento Discovered!

First of all, to get an idea of what this article is about, check out our Magento Demo Store.  Done that?  Let’s carry on…

E-Commerce has been a big part of the web industry for a long time now.  We’ve been having request to build online shops and stores ever since we started building websites (when we were called Finless Fish).

At the time we used to make what now seems very primitive shopping carts and there wasn’t a lot of functionality to offer.

Later on OSCommerce entered the scene, which we built several sites using.  OSCommerce was a shopping cart ‘software’ which you can simply download and install on your hosting.  Once installed, we’d do the configuration, and build a decent design for it.

Though this was the best product of it’s kind, we can hardly say it was easy to develop and design for.

Later, Zen Cart emerged, which was a heavily modified OSCommerce, but introduced plenty of new features – still, designing for it wasn’t the easiest task, and development was very slow.

Now, 2008, Magento is discovered!
When we first heard of Magento, we went straight to their site, clicked the Demo page and thought ‘WOW.
First impression was the looks, and as a free default design, it’s the best we’ve seen on any e-commerce software.

After that, we had a look around, looked at the technical features and were really impressed by it all.
It offers a great navigation, layered browsing (shop by price, brand etc), integrates with Royal Mail nicely and loads more besides.

Then the real test came when it was time to build our next E-Commerce website.  We made a nice looking design and had a go at converting it into a Magento skin.
The process was so easy, it’s really quite unbelievable.  The whole process took less than half the time it took is with OSCommerce and Zen Cart.

After everything, it’s safe to say that Magento is by far the best e-commerce product we’ve come across.  We’ll be using that for future websites.
Customers should also remember, half the creation time means we can offer these kinds of websites at lower prices now.

Prices for a fully customised Magento store start at £100.
Once again, the link for the demo store is: Demo Store