Magento Customization

Magento Customization

What is Magento?

Magento is an open-source E-commerce software, created by Varian Inc., it is useful for online business. Magento has a flexible modular architecture. It is scalable as well as has many control options that help the user to build user-friendly and also search engine friendly websites. It uses an E-commerce platform that offers companies various E-commerce solutions and an extensive support network. Magento that allows the user to update the E-commerce website automatically. It is simple to use, quick and versatile.

Why Use Magento?

• Magento is an open-source E-commerce software.
• Magento is scalable and offers small organizations to build the business.
• Magento enables searching and sorting of products in several ways.
• Magento easily integrates with many of the third-party sites which are needed to run an effective E-commerce website.

Features:

• Magento that provides different payment methods such as credit cards, PayPal, cheques, money order, Google checkouts, etc.
• Magento that enables shipping of products in one order to multiple addresses.
• Magento which helps to manage the orders easily by using the admin panel.
• Magento that provides the order of product status and history of the product. It also supports e-mail and RSS feeds.
• Magento that supports multiple languages, different currencies and tax rates.
• Magento that filters the products and displays in grid or list format.
• Magento which makes it easy to browse the products. It has features such as image zoom-in and checking of stock availability. Magento has built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Advantages:

• Magento is a user-friendly E-commerce software.
• Magento is compatible with smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices.
• Magento provides multiple payment options, so every visitor can make payment based on their preferred payment gateway.
• Magento has many extensions which support the development of an online store.
• Magento customization means sometimes you need to add a new feature or edit existing feature.

How to customize Magento:

Magento recommends feature customization in the following 2 ways.

1. Customize Magento using event observer: Magento has some list of the event which is get fired on some specific activity. For example, a customer login is an event which gets fired when a customer is trying to login. If you want to do some specific activity on the login of the customer then you can observe the customer login event and perform your activity. You can get the complete list of the event by Magento site event. Here you can mostly perform the database related activity.
2. Customize Magento By Creating Magento module: This is a very broad area. If you want to add some new feature or modify the existing feature then you can create your own Magento module. Magento has a very good overriding mechanism by which you can override the Magento existing module classes and customize Magento existing feature. If you want to add your new separate module then you can create a new Magento module.

Disadvantages:

• Magento uses larger disk space and memory.
• Magento takes a longer time to build customized functionality.
• Magento is very slow compared to other E-commerce sites.
• Magento needs proper hosting environment. If the hosting environment is improper, the user can face many problems