What will Magento become in 2009?

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.