Magento is really a very functional system, and if something is not enough for you - you can go ahead and find something that suits you at the huge marketplace of Magento extensions - Magentocommerce.
There you will find different Magento modules that make your store effective and user friendly.
While staying an open source system Magento also has the enterprise and professional editions that, though costing a substantial sum of money, are greatly improving the experience of their usage.
On the best side you get great support of your store and even more from the box functionality than in the free community version.
The whole thing is centered on the work with content, marketing and customer service.
Though sometimes slow Magento is somewhat stable and difficult to bring down.
Standard features: The most important thing in Magento is the amount of basic, standard features that are available from the box for this system.
The most important ones are categories, subcategories, tags, product sorting, comparing.
There are also possibilities to change the design of separate pages, rate the products, write responds add tags, and create wishlists.
Difficulties There are, however, difficulties with this system.
You will definitely waste several days to master the backend, as it ism though functional, somewhat difficult and full of features.
Statistics is relatively useful and complete too.
The usability, however, once you are used to it is relatively easy and helpful.
Ajax, flash image uploader and overall understandability of the system is present.
Technical details: Magento is programmed on Zend Framework, what is a good thing for such a complicated architecture.
Coding UTF-8.
Unpacked archive's size is 43 Mb.
Database has about 200 tables on innoDB.
Magento is, though, pretty slow and resource requiring, so you'd better care to get a serious web server.
Altogether Magento is a versatile, though heavy, functional, though a bit slow system.
It is fairly stable and has a great potential - Magento can be upgraded with an extensive amount of different features, suiting the exact needs of your store.
However Magento is really dependent on the qualification of the specialist working with it.
Just a random Indian student won't be able to properly work with the store.
On the other hand in the hands of a specialist Magento turns into a great tool and shows its potential.
What can I say - even eBay is now at the edge of the full scale partnership with this system.
And the amount of huge corporations that chose Magento as their primary ecommerce system also talks for itself.