What Is Magento?
Hey everybody, this is Ori from Astro Web. and I wanted to introduce the Magento platform. This is going to be a quick introduction video to kind of showcase what is talking about Magento and showcase some of the features. So what is Magento?
So Magento is a company owned by Adobe. Currently, it's 2018 August. And it is an open-source ecommerce platform that allows businesses to use the platform to sell to their customers. Okay. The platform is mainly a B2C (business to consumers) platform, but Adobe does have—or Magento does have a B2B extension that you can also do. But historically, it's a B2C platform.
So as far as e-commerce, what does that mean? So an e-commerce platform is a platform, is a website that you can go and set up, and you can upload your products for sale, and you can actually allow your customers to browse and Add to Cart and purchase. And then you can fulfill shipments to them. So that's the most basic idea of e-commerce.
Magento Products & Versions
So let's look a little bit about what kind of products Magento has. And then I'll show you a little bit about the backend. And then in the future, you can reference our other videos on all the specific features, how to do things, and what specific and detailed features and products they have. Okay.
So on the website, of course, their website is magento.com. And if you go under products, there's a few different products. So the most basic ones are the Magento Commerce, which is the Enterprise Edition—a paid license for their platform which includes all of their built-in features plus features that are not available to the open source and the free or no license Magento version.
_So Magento has Magento Open Source, which is a free open-source license, and they have Commerce, which has additional support, many additional features, and a few extra very important features for businesses: a payment bridge, PCI compliance, and a lot of different features. And of course, support from Magento, right?
In addition, Magento has a few other things. So first of all is Commerce Cloud. If you use Commerce or Open Source, you would have to host the website with your own servers. Magento has a service called Commerce Cloud, which includes basically all of Magento Commerce plus Amazon hosting that was set up, configured, and managed by Magento. Okay, so this is kind of the next step. So Commerce with Cloud plus a few additional features, a few different additional services, are Magento Cloud.
They also have some additional extensions/systems for just an order management backend and some very detailed business reports. And of course, you can always get some extensions that are made by extension makers that will extend your functionality of your Open Source, your Commerce, your Cloud, etc. So you can extend it by other developers.
These are the main features. So Magento currently is on a version—as far as this video has been recorded—on a version called 2.2.5, Magento 2, a lot of people call it because in the past there was the Magento 1 version. Each of the Magento 1s and Magento 2 has an open-source version and a commerce version, a paid version. And Magento 2 obviously has all of these additional ones.
So let's talk a lot about Magento before we get into the backend. So Magento is one of the leaders as far as ecommerce platforms, and it kind of ranges from fairly small—not too small businesses—to medium, to large businesses, to some enterprises. And it's really, really good at projects that are a little bit more complicated, need more customization. They're not really one-size-fits-all.
They're very good for multi-site, multi-country, multi-language, multi-currency within one specific platform. So you may have one Magento that supports worldwide, for example, and each country, for example, would have different settings and different integrations and different payment gateways and different connections to different, you know, local requirements. It's very, very good at that.
Another thing that Magento is very good at is the security. So Magento releases very regularly—if they find any security issue, they release security patches. And because Magento is run on so many websites, it's tested in the wild, which means a lot of sites, you know, use it. And so, you know, hackers obviously try to attack Magento sites. And whenever Magento gets reported or finds security issues, they'll release very quickly security updates, and then the developers will have to patch it. So security is a very, very good one for Magento.
And of course, the third one is, you know, features. So there's a lot of customizations and settings that you can do that are really fitting a ton of businesses out of the box, right? So you don't need to extend them. So taxes and different types of product types and the APIs built-in, etc, etc. So there's many, many features.
And in the videos and our YouTube channel, you'll be able to see all of these features one by one. We made a ton of videos for Magento Open Source and a ton of them for Magento Commerce. So you'll be able to see those, and I'll link the playlist in this video.
So that's a really brief idea of Magento. It's a very good platform. We work with it for many, many years, and that's our exclusive platform that we build on. I mean, you know, 95% of our work is Magento, building Magento. We've done it for years and years, and we really like it. It's a good platform. And obviously, every platform has its, you know, downsides, but overall it's definitely the best e-commerce platform that we have used, that we use, that's out there. And it's, it's, you know, it's a really good platform.
Backend Tour: The Dashboard & Store Views
Okay, so let's go to the backend a little bit. I'll show you just some basic concepts of it. And then again, you'll be able to see our videos for full details. Okay, so I went to the backend. This is a test site of ours, and when you log in, you go to your dashboard, right? So in your dashboard, you'll be able to see some basic, you know, numbers: lifetime sales, the recent purchases. Now, there's no data here, there's very little data because it's just a demo site that we use for purposes of video demos and playing around with. So, you know, we'll see some summaries of the latest orders and the latest bestsellers, etc. But what you're going to want to do when you use the platform, when you use this tool, is you're going to go to the left-hand side to the navigation, and you're going to actually go to sections here.
So first of all, before we can do that, if you have a multi-site system, if your Magento has sales in multiple countries, multiple languages, multiple stores within one instance or one specific Magento, you'll be able to have what we call stores and websites and stores and store views. So within one Magento, you can really control many businesses or many sub-businesses. And whenever you go to edit products or see reports, customers, etc., if you want to view everything, you would typically look at all or what we call the default. And if you're looking to change a setting or view something specific, you're just going to use the drop-down menus on the various pages to select and change and view data. So it's really nice to have multiple sites within one system, and each of the sites can really be different in their configuration and what they do, etc.
Managing Sales & Categories
So let's look at a few things. So sales. So this is the section that you're going to view all of your orders and your shipments and your invoices and your returns. So if you look, for example, at orders, you'll be able to see a grid, which in most of the pages, these are what we call the grid or the list pages, in this case of orders. And what you can do is you can customize the columns, you can make it, you know, more visible or less. You can just really customize and remove things or add. And you can also reorganize them. For example, I'm going to drag this to the left. So you can make it very customizable. You can export a lot of these pages and just view orders. You can view the status of the order, how has it processed? Has it been paid for? Is it moving forward? And you can obviously view specific orders.
And the order's view will give you all the detail of the processing. Has it been paid for? Has it been shipped? What way? The customer information, you know, the shipping information, payment and shipping methods, the products that were ordered, and just detail and summaries. So you'll be able to see everything here. And of course, in videos, you'll be able to see full detail. Okay, so you can see the same things for invoices or shipments or returns, which we call credit memos, and just transactions, you know, payments, etc.
The next one will be, I'm going to start with categories. So every ecommerce platform has categories, has the category structure. So for example, right here. And so you'll be able to reorganize categories by, you know, clicking and dragging and dropping. And you'll be able to manage the categories, all the information: so the SEO information, and the content, the products associated to the categories, and designs and layouts, and the content itself.
Product Management & Types
So let's go to the next one. So products. So products as well, you have, you're going to have a product list, and you can reorganize these, and you can change the product information. You can add attributes, you can organize the products in different ways. And in Magento by default, you can sell these types of products. So simple products: these are products that customers can just say they view them and they just buy. They're not customizable. You can't, they can't select different colors or different options. Configurable products are ones that customers can select different options. So for example, if you have a t-shirt in white and red and black, that would be a configurable product. You have grouped products: you can group multiple products together, so maybe these, some, a few of these multiple products. You have virtual products that are not shipped, maybe for example a subscription or access to a site or something like that, or a digital map maybe. You have bundle products: you can bundle them together, require some and have some optional. And downloadable products: maybe you're selling an MP3 or a video or something like that, maybe software, for example. Okay, so that's the idea. So every product you edit and you create, you can edit it and you can configure pricing and promotions and SEO options and of course images, and you can customize these attributes. So every product can have different attributes, different requirements, and you can organize them into ways that are very logical for the management of the system.
Okay, so next one is customers. So customers, you can view all of your customers and the customer list. And sorry, there's some issue here, so I'm going to skip this a little bit. So you can view customers, customer information. You can edit, you can register customers for them, you can edit their information, you can view what's in their shopping carts, view their order history, etc. And you can help them purchase. You can make orders for customers in the backend.
The marketing ones allow you to create promotions when customers browse the website or when customers are already in the shopping cart and the checkout pages. This is the browsing is called catalog price rules. And the checking out is called cart price rules. Cart price rules are typically coupons, but they don't have to be coupons, they can be in any different things.
Here's where you can also customize the email templates. So email templates are used for what we call transactional emails. So anytime the system needs to automatically send the email to the customer, in the most popular cases, are when customers register, or customers order, or customers have their products shipped or canceled or refunded. Those are what we call the transactional emails. So you'll be able to customize those, use some HTML, and make your own emails and change them with the wording, content, and design that you want.
Content Management & Reporting
Okay. You'll be able to have customers subscribe to newsletters and, you know, they can subscribe to newsletters, and you can send them newsletters from the system or from external third-party connections. You'll be able to see what people search for on the website. I'm sorry, on your internal website. So for example, if I'm on the front end, so a customer is going to the actual website, they'll use this internal search box. So you can see what are people looking for, what products are they looking for, and you can optimize that.
So other things is you can actually manage the content and the layout and the design and the elements and blocks and banners of your pages. So you can select that here by pages. You'll be able to do some configuration on the design and the layouts. And if you have multiple sites, that you can easily have them look differently. Of course, you'll need a developer for that, but the configuration is easy.
You can review reports, marketing reports and sales reports, top sellers, most popular products, customers by orders, and then, you know, product-related. So in addition, Magento has an additional service for business intelligence, which are basically more advanced reports. If you pay extra, you know, extra fees, you'll be able to get more detailed reports from them. Magento does have its basic reports plus some additional basic reports, and then the advanced reports are paid.
System Configuration & Final Thoughts
Okay. And then Magento has a ton of configuration. So product configurations, store configurations, payment, shipping method configurations, tax configurations, currency, search engines, and many, many, many more. The configurations of Magento are just, you know, very, very strong. You can do a lot of stuff, especially with multi-sites, but even with single sites, you can really do a lot of things and configure just how customers view and interact with the site and how the business actually, you know, sets up the site to fit what the business requirements are.
So that's basically a really, really quick overview of Magento. We made a ton of videos. I'm going to link the playlist in this video description, and you'll be able to see a ton of details of new features, existing features, how you use them. And please feel free, if you have any questions, let me know. Anything at all, let me know, and I hope we can make a video and explain and teach you guys about them. So thank you again. I hope you enjoyed this video and see you soon. Thank you.
