Magento Beginner’s Guide

Image by Guido Jansen via Flickr

Building an online store is not a walk in the park and I have developed a lot of them with osCommerce, ZenCart and even X-cart. Then I ran into Magento which has more potential than all three.

But that doesn’t mean it is necessarily the easiest software to use. Anything that runs smooth and looks good on the frontend does have a lot going on in the backend. And Magento does take some getting used to. And Magento’s Beginner’s Guide is a great place to start. While it won’t take you through all the complex procedures of building multiple store or using Magento’s API, it will show you how to get a store up and running. And it truly is a beginner’s guide, walking you through each step with annotated screenshots.

With this book, you’ll learn:

• How to upload and install Magento on your web server.
• How to build your catalog of products.
• How to display related products.
• How to set up sales tax rules down to the zip code.
• How to accept payments with Paypal, credit cards or check and money orders.
• How to create your own shipping rates or use the API’s of the United States Post Office, UPS or Fedex.
• How to give discounts based on quantity.
• How to create attributes to let your customers customize their purchase with colors, size or style

And the publisher is offering one of the most useful chapters for free. It explains the process of creating categories and attributes in Magento. But it goes further than that. It actually gives you a lesson on structuring an e-Commerce store: what should be a category and what should be an attribute. And this is useful to anyone, not only Magento users. The link is below and if you want to bring your web store into the 21st century, I suggest you click it and give free a try.

Chapter 3: Categories and Attributes