Catalogue Management with Magento

19:05:2009 | Startup Guides +

In the past decade, eCommerce has taken the traditional commercial practices by surprise with its flexibility and accessibility. Traditional bricks and mortat businesses are now finding ways to be a part of the internet bandwagon and are learning techniques from the internet that are useful in conducting business, traditionally offline. Online shopping carts have lead the path to substantial growth of business on the internet, there are millions of people doing business online and online sales are in the billions. A business owner, regardless of the scale of operation can now use an eCommerce platform like Magento to start selling a product online with little or no technical knowledge at all.

A lot has been talked about Magento, how it is the best open source and free eCommerce platform available online and how its new enterprise edition is all set to dethrone the existing leaders in eCommerce software, but not much has been said about its impressive list of features that make it a great product. Magento is not just a shopping cart, it is also a fully featured catalogue management utility. A good catalogue can do wonder for your business and goodwill.

A catalogue contains all the information a buyer would be looking for before making a purchase. Catalogues are used by online business just as they are used by a merchant who owns a store around in your local area. When a customer makes a purchase online, research shows that a product on sale with an accompanying photograph and lots of details sells better. Catalogues designed carefully can not only boost your sales but also create a good rapport with visitors who are tired of searching for more information about the product they are interested in. Most of these visitors are prospective customers looking for information like colour choices, sizes available and special features before clicking on “Buy it now”.

From the list of features currently available in Magento, Catalogue Management stands out as a gem in terms of usability, practicality and ease of use. Powerful catalogue management options give Magento an edge over its competitors. Magento catalogue management makes it fairly simple to create and manage as many catalogues as you like. Magento also makes it possible to maintain multiple stores, if you have multiple businesses online or would like to get into a new business you can make use of Magento’s catalogue management system to easily create two or more stores and manage the catalogues for all the stores from one account only unlike with other eCommerce software which require you to create separate accounts for each store. There are several features that make Magento such a great catalogue management utility and 17/18 of these features are available in the FREE community edition.

If you do not want to offer online purchasing, but still make your product database available in detail to your client's, Magento is the solution for you. And the major benefit is its highly scalabale nature, a few simple updates and your online catalogue can be transformed into and powerful online store, ready to sell for you 365 days of the year.

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