Building ecommerce sites using Magento
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Wikipedia
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. E-commerce is in turn driven by the technological advances of the semiconductor industry, and is the largest sector of the electronics industry.
The term was coined and first employed by Dr. Robert Jacobson, Principal Consultant to the California State Assembly’s Utilities & Commerce Committee, in the title and text of California’s Electronic Commerce Act, carried by the late Committee Chairwoman Gwen Moore (D-L.A.) and enacted in 1984.
E-commerce typically uses the web for at least a part of a transaction’s life cycle although it may also use other technologies such as e-mail. Typical e-commerce transactions include the purchase of products (such as books from Amazon) or services (such as music downloads in the form of digital distribution such as iTunes Store). There are three areas of e-commerce: online retailing, electronic markets, and online auctions. E-commerce is supporte The existence value of e-commerce is to allow consumers to shop online and pay online through the Internet, saving the time and space of customers and enterprises, greatly improving transaction efficiency, especially for busy office workers, but also saving a lot of valuable time.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform written in PHP. It uses multiple other PHP frameworks such as Laminas (formerly known as Zend Framework) and Symfony. Magento source code is distributed under Open Software License (OSL) v3.0. Magento was acquired by Adobe Inc in May 2018 for $1.68 billion.
The software was originally developed by Varien Inc., a US private company headquartered in Culver City, California, with assistance from volunteers and open source software contributors.
More than 150,000 online stores have been created on the platform. The platform code has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, and $155 billion worth of goods were sold through Magento-based systems in 2019. As of April 2021, Magento holds a 2.32% market share in global e-commerce platforms.
Varien published the first general-availability release of the software on March 31, 2008. Roy Rubin, the former CEO of Varien, later sold a share of the company to eBay, which eventually completely acquired and then sold the company to Permira; Permira later sold it to Adobe.
On November 17, 2015, Magento 2.0 was released. Among the features changed in V2 were:
- significant performance and security improvements, especially when paired with PHP version 7+
- integrated server-side Apache Varnish caching with minimal tuning
- reduced database table locking issues
- enterprise-grade database scalability
- rich snippets for structured data
- new file structure with easier customization
- CSS pre-processing using LESS & CSS URL resolver
- modular code base structure, offering fine-grain customization
- improved coding patterns
- built-in client-side JavaScript minimization and optimization
- improved static content browser caching
Magento employs the MySQL or MariaDB relational database management system, the PHP programming language, and elements of the Zend Framework. It applies the conventions of object-oriented programming and model–view–controller architecture. Magento also uses the entity–attribute–value model to store data and as of version 2.4 it requires Elasticsearch for its catalog search capability. On top of that, Magento 2 introduced the Model-View-ViewModel pattern to its front-end code using the JavaScript library Knockout.js.
Magento officially started development in early 2007. Seven months later, on August 31, 2007, the first public beta version was released.
Varien, the company owning Magento, formerly worked with os Commerce. Varien had originally planned to fork osCommerce but later decided to rewrite it as Magento.
In the first years of its existence, the platform has been the winner of the “Best of Open Source Software Awards” and “SourceForge Community Choice Awards” several times.
In February 2011, eBay announced it had made an investment in Magento in 2010, worth a 49% ownership share of the company. On June 6, 2011, eBay announced that it would be acquiring the rest of Magento, which would join its new X.Commerce initiative. Magento’s CEO and co-founder Roy Rubin wrote on the Magento blog that “Magento will continue to operate out of Los Angeles, with Yoav Kutner and me as its leaders.”.
Yoav Kutner left Magento in April 2012, citing that the vision for Magento had changed since the time of acquisition due to high-level staff changes.
As a result of the breakup of eBay following Carl Icahn’s raid, Magento was spun out as an independent company by the new owner Permira private equity fund on 3 November 2015.
In May 2018 it was announced that Magento would be acquired by Adobe for $1.68bn with a view to integrating it into Adobe Experience Cloud, its Enterprise CMS platform. The acquisition was finalized on June 19, 2018.