This book is a step-by-step guide to getting a basic store up and running as quickly as possible. We will use a fraction of Magento's features. However, we will cover all of the features that you need to roll out your store. By the time you finish this book, you will have a store that presents products singly and in groups, makes products easy to find, suggests related products, accepts a variety of payments, informs customers of the status of their orders, and more.
Magento enables you to create several stores that you can control from the same administrative interface. For example, you could have a discount store, a retail store, and a wholesale store—all controlled from the same Magento installation. To make the administration even easier, these stores can share payment and customer information. Although multiple storefronts are beyond the scope of this book, what you learn about setting up a single store will be applicable to any storefronts that you decide to add later.
Although Magento enables you to accept payment in multiple currencies, this book shows you how to create a store that accepts a single currency. However, the payment methods that you set up for the single currency can also be used for multiple currencies if you decide to expand your store in that direction.
This book shows you how to sell products in groups and how to display related products when a shopper is looking at a product. Magento also offers you the ability to create up-sells for your products. The procedures that you will learn to create related products are very similar to the procedures required to create up-sells.
The look and feel of your storefront can be customized in detail. You can customize the layout, color scheme, icons, graphic elements, and text of your storefront. You can display featured products on any page. You can install entirely new themes to change the look and feel of your store for a season, or whenever you want.
In this book you will learn how to customize the default Magento storefront just enough so that it becomes your store. You will learn about Magento's directory structure and where some of the elements of a store are customized. This experience will help you if you decide to go beyond this book and install new themes, or create your own themes.