Preface

This is more than a book, it's a reference guide. The reality is that you have to have the right information exactly when you need it; for that reason, the goal of this book is to cover everything you need to know to manage your store. The first time you read the book, you will be able to understand all the concepts related to managing a Magento store, and then you can use the book as a reference and quickly take a look at its pages every time you need. This book consists of four parts. We’ll get started with the general understanding of what Magento is, why and how we should use it, and whether it is possible and feasible to migrate an old web store to Magento 2. The migration part will only be interesting for those who wish to give their old websites a new life by migrating them to the new platform. We’ll introduce you to the main e-commerce concepts and basic features, and we'll let you play with them so that you can get a taste of how the catalog and content management works. We’ll show you how to tune your store for proper use. Finally, we will get serious and try to turn your sample store into a real web store, and teach you how to run it for real.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to Magento 2, covers what Magento is and what you can do with it, a comparison with the most popular competitors, and a walk-through of the new features of Magento 2.

Chapter 2, Installation, describes the system requirements for Magento, installing Magento on your local computer, selecting a hosting provider, and installing Magento there.

Chapter 3, Migration, explores how the existing Magento users can migrate their web store from Magento 1 to Magento 2, and contains a detailed guide and recommendations.

Chapter 4, Creating Your First Product, Images, Inventory, and Prices, teaches you how to add products to your store and include detailed descriptions, images, price, and inventory information.

Chapter 5, Attribute Sets and Custom Attributes, explains how to work with product attribute sets and product attributes.

Chapter 6, Product Types, describes all the supported default product types and working with configurable, grouped, and downloadable products.

Chapter 7, Categories, covers the management of categories in your Magento store.

Chapter 8, CMS Pages, Blocks, and Widgets, covers using pages, blocks, and widgets to add content to your Magento store.

Chapter 9, Managing Scope and Locale Settings, explains scope--one of the most fundamental concepts of Magento--and how to set it up.

Chapter 10, System Configuration, reviews the most important system configuration sections and fields in Magento.

Chapter 11, Working with Customers, teaches you to manage customer accounts in your Magento store.

Chapter 12, Admin Users and Roles, covers managing admin users, granting permissions to specific roles, and basic security.

Chapter 13, Taxes, explains how having taxes calculated properly is what makes you secure when you offer different types of products for different regions and different delivery points.

Chapter 14, Catalog and Shopping Cart Price Rules, teaches price rules, an essential marketing tool that brings your Magento store to a professional level; you can manage discounts and coupons based on various conditions.

Chapter 15, Processing Payments, gives an overview of the default Magento payment methods, setting up PayPal for your Magento store, and PCI compliance.

Chapter 16, Configuring Shipping, gives an overview of the default Magento shipping methods and explains how to set up shipping with UPS.

Chapter 17, Fulfilling Orders, walks you through order fulfillment; discover your options for handling order fulfillment by observing the life cycle of an order in Magento.

Chapter 18, Transactional E-mails and Newsletter, explains the setup of a newsletter and transactional e-mails so that the communication from your website corresponds to the website's look and feel.

Chapter 19, Reports, teaches you how to generate reports to track the activity and conversion rates of your Magento store.

Chapter 20, Customizing Your Magento Store, explains how to manage the Magento themes, use the inline translation tool, and review the Magento Marketplace to find new extensions, themes, and language packs.

Chapter 21, Store Maintenance, teaches you how to position the website within search engines, Cache and Index management, tuning up performance and Magento backups and how to upgrade Magento to a new version.

What you need for this book

You don't need any technical skills in order to read the book and follow each of the guides from the chapters.

Who this book is for

This book is for merchants, e-commerce managers, and store administrators. Even more than that, this book is for everyone who has a good product to sell but needs a guide.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The next lines of code read the link and assign it to the to the BeautifulSoup function." Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

php bin/magento indexer:reindex

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In order to reindex, you can click on the Indexers are Invalid link on the popup from the latest screenshot or go to the System | Tools | Index Management menu item."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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Customer support

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.

Downloading the color images of this book

We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/Magento2BeginnersGuide_ColorImages.pdf.

Errata

Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.

To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.

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Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the suspected pirated material.

We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.

Questions

If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.