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Magento is a feature packed, open-sourced (and therefore free) ecommerce system that's been available for nearly two years.
I have built many ecommerce sites using various software packages such as osCommerce, CubeCart, TradingEye, ZenCart and more, and Magento has proven itself mainly because the amount of built-in advanced features. (SEO friendly URLS, ajax search functionality, wish lists,  product comparisons, Google Merchant Centre product integration, and the ability to run several stores from one installation.)
However, Magento isn't for everyone. It's quite fiddly to install compared to other stores, it's performance isn't always great without a lot of tweaking of settings and it can take quite a long time to edit the styles as the online documentation isn't great.
If you're a developer, Magento is probably for you, you'll get a lot out of it's MVC architecture.

Pros

• Popular (over 1,000,000 downloads this year).

• Won a lot of awards.

• Free and open-source - this means programmers over the world have developed free add-ons. If you have a specialist requirement of your shop - it's likely someone has already done it.

• Customers can create Wish Lists.

• Customers can compare products.

• Customers can submit reviews.

• Built-in newsletter system - you can email all your customers on regular basis.

• iPhone interface.

• Seach Engine Friendly.

• Can be integrated with Google Analytics.

• Content Management System for non-shop pages on your site.


• Clear admin dashboard which makes it easy run your store and process orders .

• Possible to brand different parts of your shop or run multiple shop from the same admin area.

• Supports multiple currencies.

• Updating and installing extensions is done very neatly through the connection manager.

• Good support for multi-language.

• Easy integration of payment gateways.

Cons

• Can be a little slow and needs tweaking out of the box.

• Magento is more of a developers platform.

• Not for the faint of heart.

• Detailed understanding of the MVC framework needed to make customisation.

• Magento is not well documented. The MagentoCommerce website has a wiki, forums, and user guides, but developers are left to reverse engineer and discover how the application works without an SDK or developer guide.

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