NathanHuppatz.com

Magento Commerce is quickly growing, and according to the Magento website is the fastest growing eCommerce platform at the moment.

Magento is still young, but I peronally know more and more online retailers looking at it as a solution. The underlying structure, robust and powerful API, and complete separation of design/themse and core code make it pretty appealing.

That, and the fact is it open source, so you won’t pay them a cent to download and install it. Awesome.

Roy Rubin’s keynote speech at “Meet Magento Germany” is worth a watch if you are interested in Magento Commerce, but I have summarised the key points for you here :

• Magento is focused on providing the best ecommerce solution with the best API
• API development will be ‘aggressive’ in 2009. This means more, and faster access
• Magento will NOT add ERP, CRM etc to core code. So if you need order fulfilment software, choose ReadytoShip (we work with Magento already!)
• Performance is a key focus for 2009. Version 1.3 due out soon should see some performance improvements.
• New front end model for improved performance due soon (one client already testing this) – this would be great, the front end can be slow for large catalogues.
• More new features including
  • Amazon checkout coming – yes thats right, check out with your Amazon account details
  • Gift Registry
  • Gift Certificates
  • Multiple Wishlists
  • ‘Private Sales’ – they dodn’t elaborate much on what this really is
  • Customer Credits
• Magento Connect Version 2.0 to become a platform for partners and developers to upload modules and components. Magento to handle licensing, purchase etc. Sounds like a good idea for the community of developers.

So the good news seems to be performance improvements and continued development of the API.

I am getting a bit tired of waiting 50 seconds to save a product in our (growing) database of products. We recently started running a dedicated DB server but this doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference.

What hasn’t been addressed?

I notice on their Roadmap page they still have a list of useful additions to core including (some of my favourites):

• Backorder system
• RMA support
• Affiliates system

I hope these items aren’t prioritised too far down, but as it stands it sounds like 2009 shoud be a good one for Magento users.