What is Magento? How do I get it? What Version?

Magento is an ecommerce platform that lets you list items for sale online as part of an online shop. It supports checkout with many different payment methods, a range of extensions, and is currently the fastest growing solution for small and medium sized businesses. 

Magento comes in a number of flavours, all of which support the Brightpearl integration:

You will need at least version 1.6

You will need at least version 1.10.1.1

Which platform for me?

I would like a straightforward, easy to launch and easy to run store. 
Magento Go is simplest to set up and run since there is no technical knowledge required. Since it's a true cloud platform, it's hosted for you on the Magento servers. Upgrades are included in the monthly subscription fee so your system will always be bang up to date. 

I need to be able to customize the source code since I have very specific requirements
If your business model is unusual, or you have a need that is not covered within the Magento Go platform, you should implement Community Edition or higher, and find a hosting company that can provide server space. You will need to be an expert PHP developer with experience of the Zend framework in order to customize the Magento code, or engage a developer that can do this for you.

I have a large product database or many items that have many variations
You should choose Community Edition. Here's why. Brightpearl currently synchronizes only "Simple products" with Magento, which means that there is a manual step required if you want to group these onto one web page (see below). We plan to release an extension to Community Edition very soon that will make this step automated via Brightpearl; this extension will not be available on Magento Go for quite a while. If you're happy with the manual process or don't have too many items with variants, then Magento Go will be just fine.

Magento gives you two different ways of managing variants like size and color.

1. The first method is "custom options" - which are variations of an item that are not shared by other items on the system (even though they may have the same name). You can see this method in operation when you select the "custom options" tab on the Magento product edit screen. These variants cannot have their own inventory level, so you should not use this method when working with Brightpearl if you want to track inventory of variants. You might want to use this method for different engraving styles, or finishing techniques - where the inventory level of the base item is the same.

2. The second method of variant management is using multiple simple products within another "configurable" product. This is the preferred method of working with variants since each simple product has it's own inventory level. The configurable product is a separate item in Magento that is not something that Brightpearl has control of (there's no API message) which means you will need to manually connect the simple products to a configurable product if you want them to all appear on the same product information page on your website.

I DON'T have a relationship with a Magento developer
Think very carefully about whether you want to run an ecommerce business or a web development business! Unless you've got prior experience of PHP, server hosting and Magento, then working with a Community Edition store could drain time you don't want to waste. It's standard Apache/mySql and PHP, but if that's mumbo jumbo to you then probably stay clear, and choose Magento Go.

I NEED to make use of a specific extension
Magento has a huge community that provides extensions that give your store extra functionality, via Magento Connect. Only a small number of these are currently available to the Magento Go platform at the moment. In a few months, however, many more will be available across all platforms. If you need an extension that is only available on Community Edition, then you won't be able to use Magento Go - but think carefully about the difference between "need" and "want". Magento Go saves you so much time and effort on the technology side of things that you might want to reconsider your priorities.

I want to run multiple stores on a single account
Magento Community Edition and upwards has multi-store capability built-in, which means you can run different domain names, different localizations (eg language) all from one Magento installation. Brightpearl supports this capability too. Magento Go doesn't yet support multi store, however there is an alternative! Since Brightpearl is the central product and inventory hub, managing multiple Magento Go stores from a single Brightpearl account is not too troublesome, so you can still have one admin console for all products, prices and inventory levels. There are a couple of scenarios for multiple stores:

1. Different language variations on the same product set, perhaps even on the same domain name
This scenario can only be handled with Community Edition. Each of your Magento storefronts are connected to separate "channels" in Brightpearl, each of which can have it's own pricing, product description and so on. The inventory level is the same across all your stores.

2. Different product sets, different domain names, customer groups etc
Perhaps you're selling wholesale as well as retail, and you want your retail customers to only see a subset of your total product lines. You want a different domain name, different branding and so on. If you are comfortable with Magento Go capability, these stores are perhaps better managed on separate Magento Go accounts connected to a single Brightpearl back office.

Layout, design and themes
Although Magento Go doesn't support all of the huge range of themes that Magento Community does, it still has a very good selection and you still have control over custom CSS for fine tuning. If you're dead set on a completely custom design, then you'll need to choose Community Edition. Most modern ecommerce designs, however, can be implemented with the custom CSS and javascript supported by Magento Go.