Magento for Government?

By
Kristy
– November 30, 2010Posted in: local government, tech

Magento is open source e-commerce software. It has been around for the last few years, and it is now gaining a lot of momentum. Many government web managers haven’t heard of it, although I’m wondering if we should take a closer look at the potential this software has for government.

I just gave myself a crash course in Magento to create an online store for my new home business, (a CRUSB, or a completely random unrelated side business).

For those of us familiar with the click-n-go ease of developing a WordPress site, Magento will take a little getting used to. It took three months in my spare time to go from downloading my first instance to having a themed and functional site. However, like WordPress, Magento has an active open source development community. There are also various levels of supported versions – even an enterprise level environment.

The applications of Magento for government could go beyond selling logo T-Shirts and city promotional gear. What if we accepted parking ticket payments, class registrations, donations and other payment transactions using Magento? If you’re in the field, you know there are many vendors happy to charge cities tens of thousands of dollars for solutions consisting of spendy payment gateways, merchant accounts, and secure platforms.

Some of the smaller communities may be able to rig a DIY solution using Magento. Many cities don’t like to use PayPal as a payment processor because of the perception that it does not convey the professionalism required of a government. (Many businesses, too.) However, with Magento, you can sign up for a PayPal Website Payments Pro account ($30 per month), and set up your configuration to allow PayPal to process behind-the-scenes without users being any the wiser.

Citizens can even create their own user account and manage their address, save their payment information, etc. By delving further into custom code, you can likely integrate the data with your backend systems.

I’m curious what other ideas there are for using Magento for government…

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About Kristy

Kristy is a former city government web manager who has a passion for local government, social media and technology. You can find her now over at http://DigitalGovGroup.com. Kristy loves to share knowledge with other govies and think of creative ways to get citizens involved. She is also a bit of a ham.