In October we attended the first ever UK Magento Meetup (some presentation slides are available), where developers, retailers and extension developers had the chance to meet each other & with members of the Magento parent company, Varian (now owned by Ebay).

Roy Rubin (Magento) started the day by giving a broad outline of Magento's journey from beta release to its pre-eminent status in the world of Open Source ecommerce platforms.

This was followed by a technical overview by John Lunn (X.Commerce/Ebay) on Ebay's vision of an integrated platform that would enable various systems to communicate with each other. Called Fabric, this platform will enable warehousing, shipping or ERP systems to talk to payment systems or be integrated into shopping carts with a minimum amount of development effort.

As a practical example, Lunn mentioned that in future (no timescales were given) it would be possible to integrate your ebay shop with your Magento shop, so that sales on one shop would update the inventory of the other. In effect, reducing the maintenance effort currently experienced in running an Ebay shop alongside another shopping cart (like Magento).

If this initiative takes off, the benefits for retailers are obvious. Theoretically, Fabric could be utilised to perform integrations with other shopping channels, so the ecommerce landscape could be transformed from the retailers perspective.

Magento is an Open Source shopping cart, that comes in 5 'flavours': Community is completely free, while the rest are paid for: Magento Go is a hosted/rental version, Mobile is optimised for mobile devices, Professional is paid for support and Enterprise is paid for support with additional features.

If you require a Leicester Magento Specialist, please call us on 01162 793 822.

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