Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

Book Image

Magento : Beginner's Guide - Second Edition

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

Further development of your website


If you're starting with a relatively small budget, Magento offers the huge advantage that you can launch quickly with a minimum feature set. You can always improve and change your website at a later time, because it is open source software. Launching quickly means getting indexed by search engines quicker, and being able to test how to get customers quicker. The work on your store is never done. Trying to emulate the giants, such as Amazon, when you launch is impossible, so try not doing everything under the sun before you have even had one order. This goes for all aspects of your shop: marketing, sales, purchasing, customer support, and so on. You will only find out what's really important after you go live.

That said, your store should at least look reliable and work properly. Do not give your customers the impression you threw it online in a weekend. There are a number of ways to achieve this: good content, a nice logo, a well-picked theme, and more...