14 DAY TRIAL // The greatly popular e-commerce platform Magento outdone itself in Q3 of 2010, posting spectacular results, highlighted in their quarterly “Magento Momentum Report.”
Even if revenue went up 350% till 2009, the most interesting detail which can be found in the report does not involve any dollar signs.
According to Varien Inc., Magento's developing company, and also after checking with Google Trends, the platform's name (Magento) is now more popular on Google than the “e-commerce / ecommerce” keyword(s).
And if your company's name is more popular on Google than the entire market you can go on and call it a successful business.
But that's not the point. The point it's that this means more growth can be expected from the business, since people are now identifying running an e-commerce store with the company's name.
Magento has now the possibility of eternally establishing itself in people's minds as the main e-commerce tool, just like WordPress did for blogging and Google did for search.
After only two years of activity, and 2.5 million downloads later, the company is enjoying success not only for its open-source platform (Magento Community Edition), but the same can be said for its commercial version, Magento Enterprise Edition.
The paid version is bringing in almost 100 new customers each month, powering known brands like Lenovo, Levi Strauss, Flor and Giro.
The currently lived success has a direct link with its aggressive media and promotional campaign, mainly during the last year.
With our job at Softpedia of testing all new web-related scripts and indexing them into our Scripts Index, we have quite a big collection of RSS feeds to look over every morning. Let us share the fact that Magento has one of the most busiest and most interesting blog/update feeds out there.
Their growth and adoption rate has increased the company's working force from 90 to more than 200 just this year alone, while the community contributed more than 3,000 modules and extensions, all coming at a monthly rate of 100-150.
This has not passed unnoticed with other companies as well. Rackspace, one of the world's top hosting companies, awarded for a second year in a row their top partner award to Magento.
ThemeForest, the world's biggest template seller introduced in April 2010 a special category for Magento templates in their marketplace. Until then, only WordPress and Joomla had this honor, while other CMSs and e-commerce platforms being bundled together under the “Misc Templates” category.
Magento will face a difficult task next year. It's much harder to retain the crown than is to get it.
Crucial steps need to be made to take the jump from a simple successful e-commerce platform, to becoming “THE” e-commerce platform, just like the Google Trends currently show.
Releasing a mobile version of their platform (Magento Mobile) will increase their reach, but not their adoption rate.
While stores are pretty difficult to setup, maybe its the time for Magento to look into a hosted e-commerce platform solution, just like WordPress did with its wordpress.com venture.
The move proved to be a success, boosting WordPress from a simple blogging platform a few years back, to the most used blogging tool today.
That move proved to be a success because it caught the public's attention, and “forced” community support for WordPress, helping it to become the most complete and adopted CMS, even more than the former community stars, Drupal and Joomla.
While Drupal may be trying to mimic WordPress' hosted platform success with Drupal Gardens, Magento could really help itself by doing the same
The move could completely break away Magento from other the e-commerce platforms.
Just imagine setting up a store in just 5 minutes, like you'd usually do with a Blogger or WordPress.com blog.
No more negotiations and hassling freelancers when trying to implement an online shop. The sky is the limit if they could muster the financial and technological resources to pull this off.
