We are proud to announce the release of our web solution for online sales of our client Studioarch.com. At the beginning of this project we had to choose the e-commerce solution that could fit our needs at best. This is a common situation for many web engineers and we know that there are plenty different solutions out there. In this post I will show you Magento Commerce and start with some pro and cons about the platform:

Pro:
Free and opensource platform
Feature-rich solution
Based on Zend Framework
Good SEO
Good support for localization
Fast-growing community
Easy update
Easily manageable extensions
and much more...

Cons:
Not much documentation (there is a growing wiki and a nice forum, but it is still difficult to find the answer you are looking for)
Importing products not yet fully supported (import script needs some tricks and workarounds to be used)
European tax system not fully supported (VAT, B2B, B2C..., check first if what you need is supported)
Internationalization may not be complete (depending on your language)
Still many bugs (but development and bug fixing is on the go, the last release is from 1.1.8 November 26, 2008)
and maybe some more...

And now some tips to the ones that want to use this platform:

Read the designer and user guides, they are good starting points to understand how Magento works.
Choose a base template that is as much similar as possible to what you want to achieve. You will then have to do much less work to reach your goal.
Use Firebug to help you modify and test your CSS without deploying every time.
Learn how to use the layout XML files.
If you want to modify the Magento Core code, learn how to override methods and classes, this will really help you and you will not have to throw away all your modifications when you will update Magento to a newer release.
If you need to insert a lot of products you should look into the import feature. It can really be a timesaver: in example you can build a script that queries your inventory database, writes a CSV file with all your product data and loads it directly into Magento. If you only have simple products, that's all you need to do. Problems arise when you have something more complex such as configurable products, so you will have to load configurable and related simple products first, then execute a few queries to link the configurable attributes and to relate each simple product to its configurable one (check Magento forum for further help).

We are happy to have chosen Magento for this project and I think we will use it next time also.