Magento is the world's most evolved e-commerce solution. It runs on the Apache/MySQL/PHP platform. From a single installation you can control multiple storefronts, all of which share the customer and product information. Magento's templates and themes enable you to customize the look and feel of your store, even optimizing it for mobile phones. Magento's extensions enable you to connect it to a large number of payment gateways and shipping services. Modular code enables you to upgrade your Magento installation while retaining your customizations. Support is provided free of cost by an active open source community, and also by subscription to Varien—the company behind Magento.
This book provides guidance in the form of a step-by-step approach to building a simple, effective online store. The book covers the key features of Magento that will help you get your store up and running. It guides you through installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.
When you create an online store with Magento, you usually follow a defined series of steps. This book is arranged to support that process. Each chapter shows you how to get the most from one step.
You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront, so that it becomes your store. You will also learn about Magento's directory structure, and where some of the elements of a store are customized. This experience will help you if you decide to go beyond this book and install new themes, or create your own themes.
As you work your way through each chapter, your store will grow in scope and sophistication. By the time you finish this book you should have a basic, but complete, working online store.
Chapter 1 focuses on what you can do with Magento and a walk-through of a store using the features we will cover.
Chapter 2 covers the installation of Magento on a low-cost hosting service.
Chapter 3 focuses on creating categories and attributes, a necessary step before you can build your catalog of products.
Chapter 4 focuses on the configuration of tax rates and rules to automatically apply the correct sales tax based upon the type of product and the purchaser's location.
Chapter 5 focuses on adding products to your store with detailed descriptions, images, and inventory information.
Chapter 6 focuses on the customization of the default storefront to make it your own.
Chapter 7 focuses on presenting related products to your shoppers, offering products for sale in sets, and giving your customers options such as size, color, manufacturer, and more.
Chapter 8 focuses on managing customer accounts and configuring store contact options.
Chapter 9 focuses on configuring Magento's default payment options such as PayPal, credit cards, check/money order, and purchase orders.
Chapter 10 focuses on offering customers a variety of shipping options, connecting to shippers such as UPS, FedEx, and USPS, and creating customized shipping rates.
Chapter 11 covers the walk-through of fulfilling an order and discovering options for handling order fulfillment, by observing the lifecycle of an order in Magento.
Appendix A has step-by-step directions in one place, and eliminates the explanations and so that you get just the steps you need.
This book is for anyone who wants to create an online store using Magento. If you are a non-technical person and are discouraged by the complexity of this powerful e-commerce application, this book is ideal for you.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguishs between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "You can see your server's PHP information by uploading and displaying a web page that has the phpinfo function."
A block of code will be set as follows:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or may have disliked. Reader feedback is important for us to develop titles that you really get the most out of.
To send us general feedback, simply drop an email to [email protected], and mention the book title in the subject of your message.
If there is a book that you need and would like to see us publish, please send us a note via the SUGGEST A TITLE form on www.packtpub.com, or send an email to [email protected].
If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book on, see our author guide on www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our contents, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books—maybe a mistake in text or code—we would be grateful if you would report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration, and help us to improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/support, selecting your book, clicking on the let us know link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata added to any list of existing errata. Any existing errata can be viewed by selecting your title from http://www.packtpub.com/support.
Piracy of copyright material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately, so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors, and our ability to bring you valuable content.
You can contact us at [email protected] if you are having a problem with any aspect of this book, and we will do our best to address it.