Varien, a Los Angeles web development firm, has just launched a preview version of its open source eCommerce platform called Magento. Also released was a community site and a demo store. Check out the screencasts, the first of which explains how to add a new product to your e-commerce catalog using Magento – see screenshots below.
This is Version 0.6 of Magneto and so it’s an early beta release. As such, the company doesn’t recommend it for use in production environments. Magento does however come with professional and community support. Along with the usual e-commerce features (product input, shopping cart, single-page checkout, etc), some other features of note are integration with 3rd party apps and product tagging.
Magento looks to be an easy to use and easily customizable open source e-commerce platform. There are sure to be many web developers and startups keen to try it out. If you’ve already given it a test drive, please leave a comment with your thoughts. For the others, here are some screenshots:
Magento Admin interface
Frontend Demo store
Add to cart function
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)