Magento: Beginner's Guide (2nd Edition)

As a non-techie you might be a bit daunted at the thought of taking on an e-commerce system as powerful as Magento. But don't be - our guide makes it all so accessible with its user-friendly, absolute-beginner approach.

• 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.

Robbert Ravensbergen

Robbert Ravensbergen is an open source and e-commerce expert from the Netherlands. He started to work with open source solutions in the early days of Joomla!. He started his own company, joomblocks.com, from which he has been serving clients with open source solutions since 2009.

His first book about WordPress, Kickstart WordPress, Pearson Education, was released in the Netherlands in 2010. After that, several open source related books on Joomla!, Magento, and again WordPress followed. The second edition of Magento Beginner's Guide is his first international book.