Australian Statistics reveal that Six-and-a-half million Australians have Internet access at home or work, and they spend more than $11 billion dollars a year in online purchases. So, if you own a shop selling anything from jeans to jams you need to be able to tap into this lucrative marketing opportunity and open an online store with an e-commerce platform.
Magento is one of the fastest growing e-commerce platforms around and the Magento Community Edition is free! Its flexibility and wealth of features are some of the reasons this software has been downloaded by over 1 million users. Magento has placed itself in the market as one of the strongest ecommerce platforms around for stores of any size who are looking for a great online solution.
What Can Magento Be Used For?
Magento has a huge array of features to suit your online store. You can start small and grow as you become more familiar with the platform and as free updates become available for download.
There are too many features to list here but outlined below are just some of the great tools you can access through the Magento Community Edition:-
- Control multiple stores and websites from one admin panel
- Flexible coupons and pricing rules (assign to groups, specific stores etc)
- Catalogue promotional pricing
- Multiple currencies
- One Page Checkout
- Dashboard Reporting
- Abandoned Shopping Cart/Best Customers Reports
- SEO
- I-Phone optimised
Magento Hosting
Digital Pacific offers a wide array of Magento hosting options to boost your ecommerce website. In fact, Magento can be used on any Digital Pacific hosting plan except for the Personal Basic package. The hosting plan must include a MySQL database in order to store the website’s content, and that capability starts with the Personal Standard plan.
Our Hosting Control Panel, Cpanel, makes installing the latest version of Magento a breeze using the built-in software installer called Softaculous. Softaculous provides users with a one-click install option, truly taking any headache out of the setup process. All other control panel users can take advantage of Digital Pacific’s Extended Web Hosting Support to get the job done.
Importance of updating Magento
With Magento you can start out at a basic level and then once you have the confidence and see how successful certain features are you can expand and build on them. Don’t try and do too much at once. To get the most out of Magento its worth really understanding the program and how it all works first to truly get the most out of it.
New software applications and updates are available regularly so your Magento Community Edition platform will always stay up to date and fresh. Downloading the regular updates also keeps your Magento application clean and security tight.
The Enterprise and Professional editions of Magento are paid for and the benefits of this is that they come with full warranty and support services, these editions however are more suited to much larger online retailers.
Magento Themes and Styling
Magento concentrate more on the technical side of layout and themes rather than the aesthetics. But there are thousands of free and paid for themes available online to suit any kind of online retailer. You can even create your own if you have the time and the creative talent to do so!
Does Digital Pacific do website design for Magento?
Unfortunately Digital Pacific does not offer design services. But the Magento application is so popular that a quick Google search will find you great apps and funky themes so you will have a professional looking online store in no time at all.
Supporting the Magento community
There are hundreds of forums and blogging communities on the net for Magento hosting, so you will not need to look far for support or to have any questions answered.
Magento also have their own dedicated community forum on their website which houses a whole back catalogue of tips and answers to common questions. If you can’t see your question answered on the site you are welcome to post your own.
