In this article, I’ll introduce you to Magento, the platform I’ve been working with since 2011. We’ll also look at why you might want to consider learning to develop for Magento and what benefits it can bring you. Let’s get started.
What is Magento?
It’s an open source e-commerce platform written in PHP. The first version was released on March 31, 2008. At that time, Magento belonged to a company called Varien.
Today, more than 267,000 online stores run on Magento (both Magento 1 and Magento 2), including big brands like Nike and Samsung. In Slovakia, for example, GymBeam.
A few interesting statistics about Magento (2023):
- it’s used by 0.9% of online retailers
- it powers 0.6% of the entire internet
- it has roughly 5,000 downloads per day
- The top 3 countries by number of stores are the United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands
- The only 2 non-European countries in the top 10 are Australia and India
- Around $155 billion in transactions go through Magento every year
In 2018, Magento was acquired by Adobe for $1.68 billion.
As you can see, over the years Magento has grown into a huge project with many fans all over the world. It comes in two editions – Open Source and Commerce. Commerce differs in that it includes some advanced features out of the box that you won’t find in Open Source. Personally, though, I’ve never worked with Commerce.
The Commerce edition can be hosted on your own server, or you can pay for the cloud solution, where an experienced Adobe team takes care of server administration and setting up all kinds of bells and whistles for you.
Now let’s take a look at a short list of the things it offers that make it so popular.
I often say that Magento can do everything. Even make coffee. But joking aside.
Magento really is a robust system with enormous capabilities. Most stores built on it don’t use anywhere near everything it offers, and there are parts of the system that even I haven’t touched in my entire career.
Some of Magento’s core features:
6 basic product types
Simple, virtual, configurable, downloadable, bundle and grouped. These product types will most likely cover everything you need to model. If by chance they don’t, everything in Magento can be extended, and you can create your own product type.
A well-thought-out catalog
You can create different structures and categories, there’s catalog search (Elasticsearch has been used since version 2.3, and its successor OpenSearch in later versions), and promotions. Magento really can handle anything from a handful of products to hundreds of thousands of them.
Order Management
Complete order management from placement all the way to delivery, and orders can be created from the frontend or from the admin panel. What I personally miss is the ability to edit orders (other than the address) in the core version. When you need to change a product in an existing order, Magento instead offers to cancel the current order and create a new one. I developed my own solution for this.
Customer account
Customers can register before or after placing an order. That gives them access to things like their order history, a wishlist, and saved details they don’t have to enter again with their next order.
Various payment and shipping methods
Many of them, such as PayPal, Braintree and many more, are part of the core version. Most well-known payment gateways offer their own Magento extension. And if that’s not enough, anything can be developed. Any additional payment and shipping methods can easily be added to the system with a few PHP classes.
Multilingual and international support
Support for multiple currencies, plus anything in the system can be translated into any language fairly easily using a language pack and CSV files.
Multi-store support
Do you need to run multiple stores or countries with the same (or even a different) catalog from a single backend? All of this is available in Magento out of the box.
SEO and marketing tools
You can fill in various SEO attributes, create custom URLs, discount coupons, newsletters and more.
Analytics and reports
From Google Analytics to all sorts of other reports
Extensions and plugins
Need something that isn’t in the core version? Chances are you’re not the only one. Magento has a pretty big marketplace with thousands of extensions (both free and paid) that will surely solve your problem. If by chance none does, the whole system is open source and so well designed that you can write any new extension you need.
This is just a fraction of what Magento really offers. If I tried to write out the whole list, I probably wouldn’t manage it that easily.
What really makes Magento a great solution, though, are two pillars.
- The Adobe brand itself, which is a major player and a guarantee of stability
- The developer community. There are more than 300,000 Magento developers worldwide, which makes Magento an interesting project and also guarantees that if you run into a development problem, there are people you can turn to
Why do I think it’s worth learning Magento development?
Besides being fun and getting you onto interesting projects, as a skilled Magento developer you definitely don’t have to worry about being out of work. The reality for most good developers is that, unfortunately, we have to turn projects down because we simply don’t have the time.
Magento developer rates range from 10 – 20 EUR / hour for junior developers and programmers from India up to 60 – 80 EUR / hour for experts, mostly in North America and Western Europe. Everything else is somewhere in between.
The advantage in Slovakia is that there are very few of us Magento developers overall. There’s a gap in the market that you can help fill, either by working with a local brand or by expanding your work abroad. Online shopping is standard today, and as long as people keep shopping, there will be a need for developers to work on those stores.
What do you think? Has this article convinced you to start learning Magento? If so, and you’d like to have an experienced developer by your side as you get started, get in touch. With guidance from an experienced developer, you’ll progress much faster than if you were starting out on your own.