My post on Magento a while ago got a bit of interest, which wasn’t a huge surprise. There’s a lack of well made open source shopping carts out there and so the prospect of a new player is very promising to many people.

And that’s what I thought Magento was: just another shopping cart, albiet open source. A play with Magento in the last few days has made me think otherwise.

On the surface, it does seem like just another cart. I think they’ve probably done that on purpose. Once you dig beneath the surface a bit, things start to look a bit different. Magento isn’t just another cart. This is a real enterprise application.

I don’t pretend to know Magento inside and out, but here’s four things I’ve seen so far that makes me believe that Magento has aspirations beyond competing with osCommerce and all the < $1,000 shopping carts.

1. Sophisticated themes support. Skins are skins, right? Some are easy and some are hard? Nope. Take a good look at Magento’s themeing engine. Support for theme over rides & definining templates to use at a product/category level puts it at a high level.
2. Cacheing. Lots of shopping carts have no cacheing at all, others have it implemented in a fairly crude way. Magento seems to have quite sophisticated, granular, and controllable cacheing out of the box.
3. Data integration features. Integrating with external data sources is almost inevitable in the enterprise – getting data in, or out, or both. Magento has these features built in.
4. Multiple levels of shops. Magento can support multiple shops in one install. This can be at different levels – multiple completely independent shop fronts, or more interestingly, multiple shop fronts with a shared check out.

The interesting thing is I suspect some of these features, in particular the themeing, might get a bit of backlash from the casual open source script kids who can’t understand the value of the extra complexity they need to get through to get the job done.