Magento Review: Magento's Free Ecommerce Software Solution

Magento Community Edition is the free ecommerce software offering from Magento, which is an ecommerce solutions company out of Los Angeles, California. The free shopping cart from Magento is an open source software product, which means that anyone can download it and customize it however they see fit. This also means that the support is controlled and mainly community driven. However Magento is not as easy to use as other open source free shopping cart software. Merchants using Magento Community Edition typically have a significant amount of development and design expertise which allows them to fully utilize the free cart. Other merchants outsource development of their ecommerce store to a design firm that specializes in Magento Community Edition, which can be costly and still not provide all of the features you want in an online store.

Magento Community Edition bases their free ecommerce software on themes, which separate the different visual element like templates, skins, and layouts. Many compare it to the WordPress blog platform, but for ecommerce merchants. Although it is not as user friendly for the non-developer who wants an easy and free shopping cart to power their online store. In terms of features, Magento Community Edition is robust and will accommodate the needs of most ecommerce merchants. Some of the stand out features include a One-page checkout, customer reviews, and a web services API so that you can easily integrate with various third-party tools to improve your free online store. The web services API will really help you take this free ecommerce solution to the next level, but it's important to note that many of the API's are not free. Other features include URL Rewrites, Google Base integration, and support for multiple currencies.

The bottom line is that Magento Community Edition is a great choice for free ecommerce software, assuming you have significant development skills or can afford to outsource the development of an online store. If you become a fan of Magento and want to upgrade to their Professional or Enterprise editions then this is easy to do once you have the free version setup, but keep in mind that pricing starts at $2,995 per year.