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Magento Professional Released
Magento have released a new version of their shopping cart system. It is called Magento Professional aimed at small businesses.
What is Magento?
Magento is an open source shopping cart system. It is a very complex shopping cart for advanced shopping carts. I have only setup a couple Magento shopping carts where are I have setup dozens of osCommerce, CRE Loaded and Zen Cart shopping carts.
What is available?
Previously, Magento came in two different versions – Community Edition and Enterprise.
Magento Community Edition – Free
This is free to use and aimed at expert developers and technical enthusiasts in non-mission critical environments.
Even though it is free to use, like a lot of open source solutions, developers need to be paid to setup and customise these online stores and cost more than your average shopping cart setup.
Magento Professional – $2,995 USD per year
This new edition has the following added functionality -
- Rewards points system
- Gift certificates / cards
- Strong data encryption
- Customer store credits
If you wanted to offer gift certificates and can justify the additional cost of $2,995 USD per year, I would recomend it.
If you are on a tight budget, you could look at paying a programmer to add the gift certificate functionality on for you which I believe would be a cheaper option. You would need to compare the two solutions though.
Magento Enterprise – $$12,990 USD per year
This really is an enterprise shopping cart solution for your large stores on the Internet before creating the next Amazon store! It also comes with the enterprise price tag too!
This edition comes with the following extra features -
- Enhanced content management system
- Rich merchandising suite
- Private sales
- Content staging and merging
- Advanced search
- Advanced caching technologies
- Advanced user roles and permissions
If you have the budget for such a store, it’s a great solution but you can get similar functionality from other store software.
Wrap Up
I think it was a very smart move for Magento to introduce the professional edition. There was definitely a large gap between the community and enterprise editions and could be a stepping stone for online stores to upgrade to.
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