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Magento shopping cart is functionality rich and one of the most easy customizable shopping cart ever. It is really great solution for your online shop. No matter what you are selling or what service you are offering, Magento shopping cart will bring to your business new wave and will help you to sell more and more. Magento E-commerce engine out of the box have lots of cool and powerful functionality that make it one of the best e-commerce platforms.
There are more than 4,000 Magento paid and free extensions
There are 3 Magento editions:
- Community edition is absolutely free. You can download it from Magento official site, setup it on your server and launch your shop.
- Professional Edition starts at $2,995 per year. It differs from community edition by the following features:
1) PCI Data Security Standard (PA-DSS) Compliant
2) Reward Points System
3) Gift Certificates/Cards (Physical and Virtual)
4) Strong Data Encryption
5) Customer Store Credits
You can order it at Magento official website.
- Enterprise Edition starts at $12,990 per year license.It has many extra features. The basic features are:
1) CMS+ (Enhanced Content Management System)
2) Private (Club) Sales including Events, Invitations and Site access permissions
3) Highly Tuned Page Performance with Full Page Caching
Thus, these 3 Magento editions gives you full control on what you need.
No doubt, that Magento platform by default is not ideal engine and has problems or disadvantages. But there are more than 4,000 free and paid Magento modules which changes these problems and improves Magento’s disadvantages. Magento extensions have been become Magento part.
Magento Extensions
More than 4,000 various modules are added to Magento Connect. It gives you great possibility to extend Magento standard functionality and offer your visitors really pleasant shopping. Below some extensions that are worth mentioning are described.
Launching your own online store you should be aware about Magento Search Engine Optimization role. If you want to sell online, you need to be in search engine TOP to be found by your potential customers. It’s obvious thing. Magento is not good enough in regards of SEO. It has some problems that won’t help you to raise to desired TOPs. There are some nice SEO extensions which can fix these issues but one of them should be mentioned first.
MageWorx’ SEO Suite Enterprise extension for Magento platform. It really does what it’s written in its description. It fixes almost all Magento default SEO issues and transforms your site into seo-optimized and as a result well-ranked website. This module solves duplicate content problem by using canonical tag. It also makes HTML sitemap fully seo and user friendly. It adds some improvements to XML sitemap file. It transforms tags, reviews, RSS fees and layered navigation URLs into seo-friendly URLs. Finally it allows creating product title and URL templates that gives you powerful control on your product pages and their promotion.
MageWorx’sFile Downloads & Product Attachments extension. This module is a must-have solution if you need to offer your customers more information about what you are selling. If you want to upload manuals, instructions, license files or anything else you can do this in few steps with this solution. Each file can be assigned to any number of products at once. File access can be restricted by customer groups.
MageWorx’s Store & Currency Auto Switcher. This solutions is the only available from magento modules for automatic redirect to needed store based on visitor IP address. If you run multi-lanuage shop most likely you want that german visitors go to German store, US visitors to US store, Europe – Europe store etc. This extension automatically detects your visitors/customers country and redirects to the store assigned to this country.
MageWorx’s Instant Cart Magento extension. This module doesn’t do too much but what it does is really really great feature. When you add product to cart Magento redirects you directly to cart page and if you would like to add another product you need to go back. It’s really annoying. Instant Cart extension disabled this redirect and replace it with AJAX Web 2.0 feature. Thus, customers are not redirected to cart page and can add products to cart easily and instantly even from category page.