Magento – I’m Mad Frrit, Me! #ecommerce

Since starting to work for Big Eye Deers I’ve been introduced to something called Magento and it’s started to take over my life. ‘What is Magento?’ you may ask. Well, apart from being a stupid-sounding word, and all techi stuff aside, it’s basically a type of online shop (boutique or superstore) that ANYONE can have. Tiesto’s got one (yup, we did this) and non-global superstar DJs can have one too. I think they’d be good for anyone with something to sell. A florist maybe, furniture retailer, sunglasses seller, hairdresser (get your tigi products and hairbrushes selling online), you could be selling anything.

When having a Magento store built you can decide what it’s going to look like and how it’s going to work. It can have a cool/packed homepage like http://www.asos.com, great usability and search functions like on www.johnlewis.co.uk, cross selling and upselling of http://www.debenhams.com/ – whatever you want. That’s the beauty, you can sell anything on them, and they’re so versatile and easy to self-manage. None of this calling up web companies every time you want to add products etc.

Hypothetically (in my dreams) I could set up a jewellery store on there and become the next mikeyjewellery.co.uk or set up my own clothing range (vintage meaning charity shop) and become the next Atticus clothing we made this store too :) Basically with Magento the world is literally your online selling lobster, no more trout pouts, it’s accessible to anyone. Ooh, artists! I think it would be good for artists to sell their stuff. Say if you were a band with merchandise, tickets, tracks, anything – no need to be headlining in Glastonbury to make some bucks from doing what you love.

I’m so obsessed by Magento (in case you hadn’t noticed *places big L on forehead*) I even set up a website trying to highlight the benefits you get from it. I don’t think anyone’s even seen the website, the people who are coming to us for Magento stores are already well-versed in e-commerce and know about Magento usually. The website is this www.magento-stores.co.uk – it was going to be called Magento Magic, see what I did there? But my boss pointed out that I was getting a bit carried away with the whole concept that Magento is actually magic. Can’t argue with that.

Nonetheless, we’re in the middle of a couple of Magento stores now, and I am loving the process from idea to completion; it’s fascinating to see stores tailored to exactly how the client wants them to be. From multi-currency, multilingual, bespoke analytics, custom-built areas for clients to have auto-generated invoices, shipping fulfilments, all sorts! And I love the bit where we fully integrate social media (the junkie that I am) so all of the products can be pushed across twittersphere and facebook, and love how a homepage can now be kept fresh with blogs on rotation and  feeds from facebook and/or twitter.

I spend a lot of my time speaking with people about Magento, I’ve actually seen these stores in action and they are seriously fierce when it comes to getting key words found on Google. It’s a constant relationship between the technology behind Magento and Google, where they are ‘talking to each other’ daily so the content is always being picked up by Google. Most e-commerce stores take months and months to get high on the rankings, whereas Magento stores can get almost instant results if populated in the right way with the right content, blogs (WordPress integration being the way forward on this!) and the right key wording in every section.

I think that’s all from me for now on Magento magic, this was meant to be one paragraph just confessing my unhealthy interest in Magento open-source e-commerce. That is all.