Magento: Beginner's Guide

Author(s): William Rice

Publisher: Packt Publishing, Year: 2009

Description:

Create a dynamic, fully featured, online store with the most powerful open source e-commerce software

• Step-by-step guide to building your own online store
• Focuses on the key features of Magento that you must know to get your store up and running
• Customize the store's appearance to make it uniquely yours
• Clearly illustrated with screenshots and a working example

In Detail

Magento is the world's most evolved e-commerce solution. It runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From one installation, you can control multiple storefronts, all sharing customer and product information. Magento's templates and themes enable you to customize the look and feel of your store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Extensions enable you to connect Magento to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services. Modular code enables you to upgrade your Magento installation while retaining your customizations. Support is provided free by an active open source community and by subscription to Varien, the company behind Magento.

Magento is one of the most exciting, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you an extensive suite of powerful tools for creating and managing an online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.

This book provides that guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.

When you create an online store with Magento, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from one step.

You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your store and also about Magento's directory structure and where some of the elements of a store are customized. This experience will help you if you decide to go beyond this book and install new themes or create your own themes.

As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a basic but complete, working online store.

What you will learn from this book?

• Install and configure Magento and add products to your online catalog
• Create categories and attributes to build your catalog of products
• Enhance your products with descriptions, images, and inventory information
• Create product categories to help your customers navigate your online store
• Automatically apply sales tax rules to different shipping addresses and different types of products
• Present and sell products in groups and sets
• Display products related to the one that is being viewed by a customer
• Offer your customer choices for a product's size, color, or other attribute and give discounts based on quantities
• Accept payments using Paypal, credit cards, and checks/money orders and offer a variety of shipping options
• Create your own, customized shipping rates and connect to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS

Approach

This book will provide you with step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and using Magento to run your own e-commerce site. We will set up an example store in the book with enough information to adapt the instructions according to your needs.

Who this book is written for?

This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.