Magento is an Open Source e-commerce web application launched on March 31, 2008.

• It was created on the building components of the Zend Framework, which is an open source object oriented web application framework and is implemented in PHP-5.
• Magento's Enterprise Edition is a paid for version of magento which aims at larger companies and was launched on April 15, 2009.

 
Features of Magento are listed as follows:-

1. Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration panel with ability to share as much and as little information as needed.
2. Multi-lingual and support multiple currencies.Search engine friendly and automatically generates Site Map to be displayed on site.
3. Search engine friendly and automatically generates Site Map to be displayed on site.
4. Flexible pricing rules with ability to restrict to stores,customer groups, time periods, products and categories.
5. Saved Credit Card method for off line payments and accepts cheques/money orders.
6. Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment.

 
Few limitations of Magento are:-

1. Highly fragmented system.
2. Only one news letter per store can b sent to the customers. This can be revived by adding up few extensions.