What is Magento?
Magento is the most popular e-commerce software in the world.
Recent studies show that Magento powers over 20% of all online stores. The
Magento software is the only software needed to run an online store. It
displays all your products, processes credit card orders, displays statistics
on orders and website traffic, and more. To use Magento, you can either
download the free open source version or pay at least $14,420 per year for
their Enterprise edition which includes support. Magento is easy to install
with their point and click interface and no coding is required. Companies offer
paid plugins and themes to make Magento even better.
Input in Magento
Magento gathers information
from reading web servers’ log files and customers’ orders in real time. It
takes this data and stores it in a database. The web server log files can include
the visitor’s IP address (location), date, and most importantly what referring
website the user came from including the user’s search term in Google. Magento
also stores all the product data the owner types in through its menus. Each
product’s attributes can be very complex. A product can have different taxes
based on the buyer’s state or country, coupons, inventory amount, etc.
Processing in Magento
Magento takes the raw inputted
data from its database to make new valuable data. It uses formulas on the raw
data to store new data in the database such as sales statistics and the number
of visitors.
Output in Magento
Magento uses the processed
data stored in the database to output useful statistics and graphs. The owner
of the e-commerce store has a private login to access these reports. There are graphs
of all the sales and statistics on the most viewed products, the most used
searched terms in Google to find the website, and more. Each category and
product page is outputted from the stored data and website theme.
Feedback in Magento
Magento tells the store owner
when there are problems or updates with the Magento software. Furthermore, the
owner uses the outputted feedback to intelligently decide what products to promote
or discount. One can forecast sales by looking at long term sales graphs and
the amount of traffic the website receives. Thus, most feedback in Magento is not
done by a computer but by a human making changes.
How Valuable is Magento for Companies?
Magento is invaluable for the
companies that use it. Not only does it display the company’s products, store
all order information, and processes payments, it also outputs useful
statistics and graphs so that the owner can make even more sales. Without a powerful
e-commerce software like Magento, it would be impossible to run an efficient online
store.
The product of choice is fascinating, and I'm enlighten to know such a company exist with all its commodities. Another note, I especially liked how you structured your entry different from everyone else. It makes your entry look organize and precise.
ReplyDeleteI love the way you presented this! So organized and neat. I completely used your style but instead of the company you picked i used Shopify.com.
ReplyDeleteIt does similar things as your website, heck maybe your website is the engine which shopify uses. But, its great to know that sites like these exist (Couldn't agree more samantha!). Its really helpful when people want to delve into e-commerce based revenue streams.
I do have one question though. Does this website provide anything close to google analytics. I knoow you said that they track metadata and searched words which got views but do they provide the user with a graph of which words are getting the highest amount of 'hits'?
Also, have you had any experience using this website or did you just research it?
GREAT JOB! All the best.
Shopify is great and easy to use for most people but you can't really customize a shopify site or add your own code.
ReplyDeleteIt seems that Magento does not provide analytics until you install a free plugin (http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/jirafe-analytics-free-extension-4173.html). Magento has plugins for all 3rd party analytics too like Google Analytics and Piwik.
My friend uses Magento and he's showed it to me in the past. I have never used it. It honestly looks very complex to use.