Knowledge about Magento Community Edition (CE)

What is Magento CE?

Magento CE 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 CE’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, Magento CE offers companies a stable, secure, customizable eCommerce solution.

Magento CE License

Magento CE is licensed under the Open Software License (OSL) v3.0, an open source certified license. More information about Magento’s licenses can be found at http://www.magentocommerce.com/license/

Magento CE Concepts

To use Magento CE effectively, you should be familiar with the following terms and concepts.

Attribute: A characteristic of a product. For example, an attribute of a digital camera could be “resolution,” and the value of this attribute for a particular digital camera could be “10 megapixels.” Customers can filter a list of products by values of one or more attributes.

Attribute Group: A logical grouping of attributes within an attribute set.

Attribute Set: A collection of attributes, customized to fit a certain type of product. For example, if you sell several different kinds of T-shirts on your website, you can create the T-shirts attribute set which will include the simple attributes commonly shared by all of your T-shirts. This may include color, size, gender, and brand.

Bundle product: This product is composed of components that are presented in different ways and are made from existing products. A good example of a bundle is a complete computer. For this computer, you can configure how much RAM or what kind of monitor is included with this computer in your store.

Category: A user-defined product classification. A category can have any number of levels of subcategories.

Configurable product: This product enables your customers to select the variant that they want by choosing options. For example, you can sell T-shirts in two colors and three sizes. You would have to create six variants as individual products (each with its own SKU) and then add these six to a configurable product where customers can choose the size and color, and then add it to their cart.

Credit memo: A credit memo is a statement of credits; for example, a credit for returned merchandise generates a credit memo. According to your store policy, you can apply the credit to future orders or refund the customer’s payment method.

Cross-sell: Cross-sell products appear next to the shopping cart. When a customer navigates to the shopping cart page, these products are displayed as cross-sells to the items already in the shopping cart. They are similar to impulse buys, like magazines and candy at the cash registers in grocery stores.

Downloadable product: A product, such as a media file, that the customer downloads from the store after purchase. These downloadable files can reside on your server or be provided as URLs to any other server.

Grouped product: This option enables you to display several similar products on a single page. For example, if you are selling chefs’ knives and you have the same knife in four sizes, you can make a grouped product to display all four of these sizes. Customers can select the size(s) that they want and add them to the cart from this page.

Invoice: An invoice in Magento CE represents a confirmation of payment. More than one invoice can be associated with a single order. If the products in an order are shipped in multiple shipments, then an invoice is generated for each shipment for the products in that shipment.

Order: An order is a request for goods.

Order status: The order status indicates where it is in the order cycle. In Magento CE, the system order status values are the following:

• Pending - Pending orders are brand new orders that have not been processed. Typically, these orders need to be invoiced and shipped.
• On Hold - The user cannot proceed to order processing if the order is in this state. This is convenient if, for example, some data must be verified.
• Pending PayPal (possible for PayPal orders only) - Pending PayPal orders are brand new orders that have not been cleared by PayPal. When using PayPal as a payment method, customers are redirected to the PayPal website. If they have not paid for the order, orders will be marked as Pending PayPal. It is not recommended to process these orders without referencing PayPal first to see if payment has been made.
• Payment Review - As long as an external payment gateway is verifying the payment information from a sales order, the order is assigned the Payment Review status both in the payment system and in Magento CE.
• Processing - Processing means that the order has been either invoiced or shipped, but not both.
• Suspected Fraud (possible for PayPal orders only) – The order transaction did not pass one or more of the PayPal fraud filters and the system receives the response from PayPal that the transaction is under review by Fraud Service Complete - Orders marked as complete have fully been invoiced and have shipped.
• Canceled - The order can be of this status if the customer calls your web store and asks to cancel an order if the order has not been paid for.

The store administrator can create custom order statuses, assign them to order states and set default status values for order states.

Product type: Magento CE classifies products as one of several predefined product types: Simple Product, Virtual Product, Downloadable Product, Grouped Product, Configurable Product, Bundle Product.

Related product: Related products are offered to the customer for purchase in addition to the item that the customer is viewing.

Scope: Scope describes the extent of your store hierarchy to which a given setting is effective. A setting can have a scope of Global (all websites, stores, and store views), Website (the selected website and all stores and store views under it), Store (the selected store and all store views under it), and Store View (the selected store view). Some settings that are set at a higher level can be overridden at a lower level.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The set of techniques and strategies that ensure that your site is listed prominently in search engine results, thereby increasing the likelihood that customers will find your site.

Simple product: This is the most basic product type. It is suitable for all kinds of physical (shipped) products.

Shipment: A shipment is a record of the products in an order that have been shipped. More than one shipment can be associated with a single order.

Shopping cart: The set of products that a customer has selected to purchase, but has not yet purchased.

Store: The second level of your store hierarchy. A website can have multiple stores (each, potentially, with its own root category), and a store can have multiple store views.

Store View: The lowest level of your store hierarchy. Typically, a store view is created for each locale or language. All store views under a given store share the same catalog. Customers use a drop-down list on the frontend to switch from one store view to another.

Tax rule: A combination of a product tax class, customer tax class, and tax rate. This rule defines which tax calculation is applied.

Up-sell: An up-sell item is one that is offered to the customer as an alternative to the product the customer is viewing. These products may be more expensive, of higher quality, or more popular, or produce a higher profit margin.

Virtual Product: This is a product that does not require shipping or inventory. It is generally used for warranties or services.

Website: The highest level of your store hierarchy. You can have multiple websites, and each website can have a different domain name. Websites can be set up to share customer data, or to not share data. Typically, each website has different lines of products and may have different customer bases.