What is Magento?
November 4th, 2009 // 2:14 pm @ Amaete Umanah
Magento is a new open source ecommerce platform that aims to handle all aspects of building and maintaining an ecommerce site including shopping carts, shipping, product reviews, and much more. The company looks to play in the “professional open source” space, offering its code base to developers that want to build their own plugins or create customized versions of the software. Magento seems to be off to a good start with more than 10,000 downloads in the two weeks since first being released, according to the company.
Magento plans to make money by offering an enterprise edition, partnerships with third parties that want to integrate with the platform (for example, payment gateways), and a platform for companies to buy and sell components for the software. Other potential revenue streams include training, certifications, and consulting.
The approach Magento is taking to ecommerce software is very similar to the approach Zimbra successfully applied to email. Considering the $350 million pay-off Zimbra received from Yahoo, Magento may be onto something as they go after one of the Web’s largest segments in ecommerce.
Magento’s software was launched after a development period of 7-8 months. Magento is a product of Varien, a web development and ecommerce software company.
