Book Image

Magento: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Magento: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Magento is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you the ability to create and manage a profitable online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition provides guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.Magento Beginner's Guide - Second Edition guides you through the installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders. You will start with installing Magento on a hosting provider or on your local machine for testing purposes. From there, you will learn everything Magento has to offer, from working with products to adding additional functions.After installing Magento, you'll learn how to set up your first store and add multiple stores in the same environment. One of Magento's strengths, the product catalogue, will also be discussed thoroughly. From there we'll continue to set up payment and shipping methods. You'll learn to use themes to give your store the look and feel you need. As well as that, you'll start using extensions to expand Magento's functionality and you'll learn to process your first orders.You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your personalized store and also about Magento's directory structure and find out where some of the elements of a store are customized. As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book, you should have a complete, working online store.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Magento Beginner's Guide Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 1. Installation

OK, so we briefly introduced Magento to you, but actually if all you want to do is to get started? Well, then this chapter is for you. We'll not only discuss how you can set up a local test environment on your machine, but we'll also help you in selecting a good hosting provider for your live store. We'll give an example of installation at a hosting provider, so that you can take all these steps yourself.

This chapter is written especially for you, if you:

  • Want to set up your own Magento test environment

  • Want to install Magento using a commonly available hosting service

  • Are familiar with putting files up on a web server, but that is the limit of your technical knowledge

  • Are eager to get your store up and running as fast as possible

  • Already tried installing Magento yourself, but got stuck somewhere

Even if you are an experienced user, this chapter is still worth reading. It can save your time by helping you to avoid problems while installing Magento. Although the installation process in itself isn't a difficult one , there are things that can (and will) go wrong. We know how frustrating it is when you get stuck during the very first steps of using a new piece of software. Therefore, we created an extensive chapter and tried to be as complete as possible.