MM Sports Beta website
We hereby introduce the new MM Sports website. The website is still in a beta version in the sense that the final migration from our current website has not yet taken place. But besides that the website is already by now operational. We need to test it and to have it tested by the public in order to rout out bugs or potential usability problems. But hopefully we will be able to make the switch from Beta to Alfa within the next couple of months and before the holiday season.
The new website has been built on the Magento platform which is a new e-commerce platform dating back to 2008. The platform is Open Source but is being backed by a company Varien. Varien provides paid versions beyond the freeware community edition. Thus there is a professional version and an enterprise version which are leased to companies or corporations which need a supported and fully tested solution.
The big advantage running on a platform like Magento is that it is very cost efficient. A number of extensions are available at a low cost and there is a large developer community which can provide assistance for custom tasks which is not covered by the basic framework nor any of the extensions available.
In 2011 Magento was finally acquired by Ebay which now owns the shopping platform entirely. It is part of Ebay’s newly defined strategy about being a player in all kinds of e-commerce. Not only by providing the e-commerce platform for auction based deals or fixed priced sales that we now from ebay.com. But also as a technology company in the sphere of e-commerce tecnology, fulfillment and marketing (thus the acquisition of GSI Commerce), and the acquisition of Magento etc. Not the least by trying to push its’ market leading payment service Pay Pal.
So we will probably expect to see an even tighter integration between Magento , Pay Pal and Ebay.com in the future. But most likely the open source component will be maintained so it is up to the merchant whether he or she wants to use the integrated services from Ebay Inc.