What is Magento?

According to the wikipedia

Magento is an open source e-commerce web application that was launched on March 31, 2008. It was developed by Varien (now Magento Inc) with help from the programmers within the open source community but is owned solely by Magento Inc..

Magento was built using the Zend Framework. It uses the entity-attribute-value (EAV) database model to store data.

The Magento Community Edition is the only free version of Magento available.

According to the Magento Commerce

Magento 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’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 and backed by Varien's support network, Magento offers companies the ultimate eCommerce solution.

About Magento

Magento has been picking up a lot of attention recently, and some retailers may be wondering, What is Magento?

Magento is a feature-rich, professional open-source ecommerce solution that offers merchants complete flexibility and control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. Magento’s intuitive administration interface contains powerful marketing, merchandising and content management tools to give merchants the power to create sites that are tailored to their unique business needs, putting no constraints on business processes and flow. When Magento was released in 2007, it transformed the ecommerce platform market. In a period of 18 months, Magento surpassed one million downloads and now records billions of dollars of transactions worldwide by tens of thousands of merchants. Purchased by eBay in early 2011, it continues to be the fastest growing ecommerce platform in the world.

Magento is written in PHP and utilises the Zend Framework (which is MVC based) and uses an EAV-based MySQL database. The system is highly modular and Magento’s architecture handles module database schema updates automatically.