Magento, the popular open-source e-commerce platform that debuted in 2007, recently surpassed 4 million downloads of its free Community edition, Roy Rubin, founding chief executive, tells Internet Retailer.

Acquired by eBay Inc. last summer and now a part of eBay’s X.commerce “open commerce” technology platform, Magento has also racked up sales of its licensed Enterprise and software-as-a-service Go editions to thousands of retailers, says Rubin, who is now general manager of Magento under eBay. Clients range in size from merchants doing less than $1 million a year in sales to more than $100 million, he adds. Magento’s clients include apparel manufacturer and retailer The North Face, a unit of VF Corp., No. 138 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide, and menswear manufacturer and retailer Bonobos Inc., No. 789 in the Second 500 Guide.

In many cases, companies and independent technology developers start off with the free Community edition to explore Magento’s open-source technology before migrating to the Go or Enterprise editions, Rubin says. The Community edition requires the company deploying it to invest time and expertise , but the Go software-as-a-service, or SaaS, version can be deployed as quickly—in no more than a few hours—by non-technical employees, depending on a site’s complexity and depth of content, he says. Open-source technology makes publicly available the core software code, enabling a community of developers to build on new features that then become available to other users. Although the source code is freely available, deploying new feature extensions may come with consulting fees.

In addition, Magento is working within X.commerce to integrate with other eBay e-commerce technology and services, including the PayPal online payment system that is also part of X.commerce and the online marketing and fulfillment offerings of eBay’s GSI Commerce unit, which eBay acquired last year. “We’re spending a lot of time working within the eBay family, taking advantage of synergies to provide a one-stop shop for an e-commerce platform and online payments,” Rubin says.

Magento is also working with large eBay sellers as well as merchants in general  that don’t sell on eBay to help them explore how they can grow in e-commerce, he adds. “We’re looking at a wide spectrum of what merchants need and what assets we can provide to help them fulfill those needs,” he says.

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Posted in Magento Tags: Magento, magento Community edition, open-source e-commerce platform