Redstage Magento Blog

What is your Favorite Open Source E-Commerce System? Over the past few months, I’ve seen a few new systems emerge and they are rapidly gaining traction, building developer communities, and introducing new extensions, capabilities and features. Obviously, we’re big fans of Magento mainly because of the scalability, community and out-of-the-box feature set (as well as it’s current popularity).

As newer systems become more popular, we would like to hear your feedback as to which you like, or think can compete with Magento’s popularity and growth.

After you vote for your favorite system, leave a comment below letting us know why it’s your favorite. Was it a great experience with a client? Are you currently using the system to run an e-commerce business?

On the other hand, you might be a fan of a hosted solution like Shopify or Volusion, or a multi-channel solution like GSI or Websphere – we would be happy to hear about those as well! Leave your comments below!

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If you want more information about any of these systems, here are short descriptions links to their official sites.

Cube Cart
http://www.cubecart.com/
“CubeCart is an “out of the box” ecommerce shopping cart software solution which has been written to run on servers that have PHP & MySQL support. With CubeCart you can quickly setup a powerful online store which can be used to sell digital or tangible products to new and existing customers all over the world.”

Magento
http://www.magentocommerce.com
“Magento is a feature-rich eCommerce platform built on open-source technology that provides online merchants with unprecedented flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their eCommerce store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface features powerful marketing, search engine optimization and catalog-management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs. Designed to be completely scalable and backed by Varien’s support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.”

Open Cart
http://www.opencart.com
“OpenCart is an open source PHP-based online shopping cart system. A robust e-commerce solution for Internet merchants with the ability to create their own online business and participate in e-commerce at a minimal cost.”

OSCommerce
http://www.oscommerce.com/
“osCommerce has attracted a large growing e-commerce community that consists of over 231,400 store owners and developers who support each other and extend osCommerce Online Merchant with add-ons being contributed on a daily basis. To date there are over 5,900 add-ons that are available for free to customize osCommerce Online Merchant online stores and to help increase sales.”

Prestashop
http://www.prestashop.com
“PrestaShop™ is a professional e-Commerce shopping cart software that you can download and use for free. The big advantage of open-source software: you’re never ‘locked’ to expensive commercial software. Our dedicated team and growing user community join forces to fix bugs and add new functionality at a rate proprietary software companies can rarely claim. Join the Open Source revolution!”

Spree E-Commerce
http://spreecommerce.com
“Spree capitalizes on the dynamic nature of the Ruby programming language to provide the most flexible commerce platform available. Spree has been designed from the ground up to be as open and extensible as possible. You no longer have to be frustrated with the limited set of choices provided by most platforms. Spree is maintained by an active team of developers who continue to refine the code based on lessons learned from the challenges of real world deployments”

UberCart
http://www.ubercart.org
“Ubercart is an exciting open source e-commerce package that fully integrates your online store with Drupal, the leading open source content management system. This is a killer combination for anyone looking to build a community around a product, sell access to premium content, offer paid file downloads, and much much more!”

Zen Cart
http://www.zen-cart.com
“Zen Cart™ truly is the art of e-commerce; free, user-friendly, open source shopping cart software. The ecommerce web site design program is being developed by a group of like-minded shop owners, programmers, designers, and consultants that think ecommerce web design could be and should be done differently.”

Magento, with its wide support for multiple payment gateways, makes it easier than ever to accept customer payments. There are a plethora of payment gateways out there, and today we’re going to show you just how easy it is to set up Authorize.net. Authorize.net acts as an intermediary between your Magento store and the vast payment processing networks.

The Process:

• Gather Account-Specific Authorize.net Data
• Enter this Data into Magento
• Enable the Payment Module

I. Gather Account-Specific Authorize.net Data

Once you have an account with Authorize.net, you’ll need to obtain values for these fields:

• API Login ID
• Transaction key
• Merchant’s Email (this you should already have)

To find these, follow these steps (source):

1. Log in to your Merchant Interface at https://account.authorize.net
2. Click Settings in the main left side menu.
3. Click API Login ID and Transaction Key.
4. Under Create New Transaction Key, enter your Secret Answer.
5. Click Submit.

II. Enter this Data into Magento

Log in to your Magento Admin Panel.  Then, using the horizontal navigation at the top, navigate to System > and click Configuration.  Once that page loads, look for and click on “Payment Methods”, found in the left-column under the “Sales” category.  When the page loads, expand the “Authorize.net” area in the main-column by clicking on it.

Add the relevant Authorize.net values from the previous step, and set the various settings to your liking (e.g. which credit cards to accept, whether or not to require CVV validation, etc.)

Authorize.net Settings

III. Enable the Payment Module

While still in the “Authorize.net” area of System > Configuration, change the “Enabled” dropdown (first setting) to “Yes“.

Enable the Authorize.net Payment Module

Finally, click the “Save Config” buton found at the top-right hand side of the screen.

This is an old video of Roy Ruben from Varien talking about his vision of open source eCommerce and Magento. It was shot almost 3 years ago and shows the motivations of the company behind the system.

I first saw this over at TechCrunch’s article about Magento’s Funding.

The best part of that article is the end where they mention, “The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.”. We can’t wait to see where the investment money goes and hope that the rumors of a mobile commerce app is very exciting.

Do you think that the guys at Varien were successful in their vision over the past 3 years? Leave a comment below!

How would you like to spy on your website visitors? Would it be useful to see visitor behavior, detailed down to mouse movement? The answer is YES! The site is called Clicktale. I made a quick video about the system, and how to get the free version. There’s a link to the site below the first video. Also, there’s an overview video under that so you can see a bit more detail about Clicktale, and how powerful it is. Take a look and enjoy!

Here’s an overview video of Clicktale, take a look.

Adding a video to a product greatly enhances the online shopping experience. The out-of-the-box Magento package doesn’t support video. This How-To shows just how to do that. We’ll be able to either (1) drop in HTML embed code from sites like YouTube, or (2) use an FLV file that we provide.

This article assumes you have the jQuery Javascript library installed and have “jQuery.noConflict()”‘ set up.  If you don’t have jQuery.noConflict(), then simply replace instances of “jQuery” with “$”.  If you don’t have this library, download jQuery here.

Here’s the sequence of steps we’re going to take:

1. Create a product attribute for the video code
2. Assign the newly created attribute to an attribute set
3. Modify the template files
4. Obtain and upload a copy of the free JWPlayer
5. Add video to a product using HTML embed code or using an FLV file

1. Create a product attribute for the video code.

Log in to your Magento Admin Panel. Navigate to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attributes. Click on the “Add New Attribute” button found close to the top-right hand corner of the screen. The first tab that’s open is the *Properties* tab. You are presented with lots of textboxes and dropdowns. Here’s what to fill them in with (you can also view this screenshot):

Attribute Properties

- Attribute Code: video
- Scope: Global
- Catalog Input Type of Store Owner: Text Area
- Default Value: [leave blank]
- Unique Value: No
- Values Required: No
- Input Validation for Store Owner: None
- Apply To: All Product Types

Frontend Properties

- Use in quick search: No
- Use in advanced search: No
- Comparable on Front-end: No
- Use in Layered Navigation: No
- Use in Search Results Layered Navigation: No
- Use for Price Rule Conditions: No
- Position: 0
- Allow HTML-tags on Front-end: Yes
- Visible on Product View Page on Front-end: No
- Used in product listing: No
- Used for sorting in product listing: No

Then navigate to the *Manage Label / Options* tab. You only have to fill in the “Admin” value, and for this use “Video“. This can be changed later if you need to.

Click the “Save Attribute” button to save the attribute.

2. Assign the newly created attribute to an attribute set (likely Default)

While still in the Admin Panel, navigate to Catalog > Attributes > Manage Attribute Sets. From the right-hand column, labeled “Unassigned Attributes”, drag our new video attribute to the “General” group found in the middle column.

Click “Save Attribute Set” button to save the attribute set.

3. Modify the template files

You’ll need to use a text-editor and FTP client.

3a. video.phtml

Create a file with these contents:

<?php
$_product = $this->getProduct();
?>
<?php if( $video = $_product->getVideo() ){ ?>
<h2>Product Video</h2>
<div class="products">
<?php if( file_exists( getcwd() .'/skin/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/videos/'. $video ) ){ ?>
<div id="mediaspace">&nbsp;</div>
<script>
jQuery( document ).ready( function(){
jQuery.getScript( '<?php echo $this->getSkinUrl('videos/mediaplayer/swfobject.js'); ?>', function(){
var so = new SWFObject('/skin/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/videos/mediaplayer/player.swf','ply','470','320','9','#ffffff');
so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');
so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');
so.addParam('wmode','opaque');
so.addVariable('file','<?php echo Mage::getBaseUrl(); ?>/skin/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/videos/<?php echo $video; ?>');
so.write('mediaspace');
} );
} );
</script>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php echo $video; ?>
<?php } ?>
</div>
<?php } ?>

And save the file as /app/design/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/template/catalog/product/view/video.phtml

3b. catalog.xml

Open up /app/design/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/layout/catalog.xml and add this line:

<block type="catalog/product_view" name="product_video" as="product_video" template="catalog/product/view/video.phtml"/>

as a child anywhere inside this node:

<block type="catalog/product_view" name="product.info" template="catalog/product/view.phtml">

… and save the file.

3c. catalog/product/view.phtml

Open up /app/design/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/catalog/product/view.phtml and add this line:

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('product_video'); ?>

wherever you want the video to appear on the page. Save the file.

4. Obtain and upload a copy of the free JWPlayer

Download the player from: http://www.longtailvideo.com/players/jw-flv-player/

After you download the ZIP file, extract and upload the files using an FTP client to: /skin/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/videos/*

With the FTP client, rename the “mediaplayer-viral” folder to “mediaplayer”

5. Add video to a product

In the Magento Admin Panel, navigate to Catalog > Manage Products and click on the product you’d like to add video to. You should see a textarea labeled “Video”.

5a. Use HTML embed code

In the “Video” textarea, simply drop in the HTML code you’ve received (such as from YouTube) and click “Save” to save the product.

5b. OR use an FLV file

- Upload your FLV file to /skin/frontend/[your-package]/[your-theme]/videos/

- In the “Video” textarea, specify the filename of the FLV you’ve just uploaded.

Repeat Step 5 for all of the products you want to add video to.

Congratulations, you’ve added video to your products.

* This method is tested and working for Magento v 1.3.2.4