Mangeto is one of the top most popular and widely used e-commerce platform. It is used by over 200,000 merchants from all around the world and according a study by Alexa, 20% of all the world's e-commerce website use Mangeto. One thing that makes Mangento popular among merchant is cause of it high level of flexibility and customization, making it possible to add any type of feature to your online store. It is important to note that Mangento is well known to have a steep learning curve, you will need to have development experience or be ready to hire an experienced developer if you plan on using Mangento.
Products
Mangeto e-commerce software is available in two packages
- Mangeto Open Source: This is also formally known as Mangento Community Edition. It is open source and available completely for free. It is important to note that even if it's free to use, you will still need to make provision for hosting, domain, SSL Certificate and so on.
- Mangento Commerce: Also formally known as Mangento Enterprise Edition. It is quite pricey and it is targeted throughwards large cooperation with high spending budget.
Important Features Of Mangento
- Built-in SEO Tools: Google Site Map, ability to create meta-information for all products and products categories, ability to customize and tweak URLs for SEO etc.
- Built-In Marketing Features: customers persistent shopping carts, ability to create flexible coupon codes, social share buttons, Newsletter management etc.
- Built-In Analytic Features.
- Mobile And Tablet Support: Ability to quickly create a fully responsible site that work on any device using base theme.
- Advance Admin Features: User access and permission management, invoice printing and packing of slip directly from admin panel, Multiple site and stores management.
- Multilingual Support Built-in
- Ability to extend functionality using extension
- Availability of popular payment processor integration.
Mangento was created in 2007 by Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. It was developed over the years and was later purchased by e-commerce giant eBay in 2011. Currently Mangento is managed by Adobe who purchased it in 2018.
Pros:
- Powerful, scalable and highly customizable.
- Absolutely free to download and use (Mangento Open Source).
- Availability of over 2,500 extensions.
- It is feature intensive
- It is optimized for high traffic making it suitable for large enterprise with large customer base.
Cons:
- It has a high learning curve, requires someone with development experience (especially with PHP) in order to tweak.
- Due to it high requirement it is adviseable to host Mangento on a dedicated server, which is not always cheap.
- Development and maintenance of the software is expensive.
Conclusion
Mangento is a really powerful e-commerce software but personally i won't recommend it for someone who is planning to open a small personal online store due to it development cost and steep learning curve. They are alot of better alternative out there for small merchanst that that are alot easier to setup and will save you alot of time.
