Magento: Beginner’s Guide, 2nd Edition

Learn how to create a fully featured, attractive online store with the most powerful open source solution for e-commerce

Overview

• Install, configure, and manage your own e-commerce store
• Extend and customize your store to reflect your brand and personality
• Handle tax, shipping, and custom orders

In Detail

Magento is one of the most powerful, flexible, and customizable e-commerce systems. It offers you the ability to create and manage a profitable online store. As your online store grows, you can be sure that this robust e-commerce system can handle your needs. However, getting started with Magento can be difficult without the right guidance.

Magento Beginner’s Guide – Second Edition 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..

Magento Beginner’s Guide – Second Edition guides you through the installation, configuration, populating your store with products, accepting payments, maintaining relationships with your customers, and fulfilling orders.

You will start with installing Magento on a hosting provider or on your local machine for testing purposes. From there, you will learn everything Magento has to offer, from working with products to adding additional functions.

After installing Magento, you’ll learn how to set up your first store and add multiple stores in the same environment. One of Magento’s strengths, the product catalogue, will also be discussed thoroughly. From there we’ll continue to set up payment and shipping methods. You’ll learn to use themes to give your store the look and feel you need. As well as that, you’ll start using extensions to expand Magento’s functionality and you’ll learn to process your first orders.

You will learn to customize the default Magento storefront so that it becomes your personalized store and also about Magento’s directory structure and find out where some of the elements of a store are customized. 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 complete, working online store.

What you will learn from this book

• Install Magento at a hosting provider and create a local installation for testing purposes
• Set up Magento for its first use
• Create product categories, attributes, and your very first products
• Learn to use Magento’s extended possibilities for complex products
• Work with your customer database
• Set up payment and shipping methods
• Work with Magento themes
• Install extensions to expand Magento’s functionality even further
• Process sales orders, invoices, and packing slips
• Learn to maintain your store and take it to the next level

Approach

This book is written in a friendly, Beginner’s Guide style with plenty of step-by-step instructions for installing, configuring, and using Magento to run your own e-commerce site. We will set up an example store in the book with enough information to adapt the instructions according to your needs.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Installation
Chapter 2: General Configuration
Chapter 3: Categories and Attributes
Chapter 4: Simple Products
Chapter 5: Beyond Adding Simple Products
Chapter 6: Customer Relationships
Chapter 7: Accepting Payments
Chapter 8: Configuring Shipping
Chapter 9: Customizing Your Store’s Appearance
Chapter 10: Fulfilling Orders
Chapter 11: Maintaining and Administrating Your Store

Appendix: Pop Quiz Answers