Building ecommerce sites using Magento Innovation

Building ecommerce sites using Magento Innovation

COURTESY :- vrindawan.in

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 supported by electronic business. 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.

E-commerce businesses may also employ some or all of the following:

• Online shopping for retail sales direct to consumers via web sites and mobile apps, and conversational commerce via live chat, chatbots, and voice assistants;
• Providing or participating in online marketplaces, which process third-party business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sales;
• Business-to-business (B2B) buying and selling;
• Gathering and using demographic data through web contacts and social media;
• B2B electronic data interchange;
• Marketing to prospective and established customers by e-mail or fax (for example, with newsletters);
• Engaging in pretail for launching new products and services;
• Online financial exchanges for currency exchanges or trading purposes.

There are five essential categories of E-commerce:

• Business to Business
• Business to Consumer
• Business to Government
• Consumer to Business
• Consumer to Consumer

Contemporary electronic commerce can be classified into two categories. The first category is business based on types of goods sold (involves everything from ordering “digital” content for immediate online consumption, to ordering conventional goods and services, to “meta” services to facilitate other types of electronic commerce). The second category is based on the nature of the participant (B2B, B2C, C2B and C2C).

On the institutional level, big corporations and financial institutions use the internet to exchange financial data to facilitate domestic and international business. Data integrity and security are pressing issues for electronic commerce.

Aside from traditional e-commerce, the terms m-Commerce (mobile commerce) as well (around 2013) t-Commerce have also been used.

In the United States, California’s Electronic Commerce Act (1984), enacted by the Legislature, and the more recent California Privacy Rights Act (2020) enacted through a popular election proposition, control specifically how electronic commerce may be conducted in California. In the US in its entirety, electronic commerce activities are regulated more broadly by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). These activities include the use of commercial e-mails, online advertising and consumer privacy. The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 establishes national standards for direct marketing over e-mail. The Federal Trade Commission Act regulates all forms of advertising, including online advertising, and states that advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive. Using its authority under Section 5 of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, the FTC has brought a number of cases to enforce the promises in corporate privacy statements, including promises about the security of consumers’ personal information. As a result, any corporate privacy policy related to e-commerce activity may be subject to enforcement by the FTC.

The Ryan Haight Online Pharmacy Consumer Protection Act of 2008, which came into law in 2008, amends the Controlled Substances Act to address online pharmacies.

Conflict of laws in cyberspace is a major hurdle for harmonization of legal framework for e-commerce around the world. In order to give a uniformity to e-commerce law around the world, many countries adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Commerce (1996).

Internationally there is the International Consumer Protection and Enforcement Network (ICPEN), which was formed in 1991 from an informal network of government customer fair trade organisations. The purpose was stated as being to find ways of co-operating on tackling consumer problems connected with cross-border transactions in both goods and services, and to help ensure exchanges of information among the participants for mutual benefit and understanding. From this came Econsumer.gov, an ICPEN initiative since April 2001. It is a portal to report complaints about online and related transactions with foreign companies.

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 os Commerce 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.