Do you like Magento as much as we do? We don’t like to take ourselves too seriously all the time so this week we thought we’d tell you 10 facts you never knew about Magento!

1. Magento for 99,9% was developed in Ukraine, though the head office of Varien, the company making it, is based in Los Angeles and fully owned by US-based management.

2. Why Ukraine? Yoav Kuttner, former Varien СТО, told in his interview that when building the development team back in 2006, right a week after he had decided to quit searching for remote developers and focus on establishing LA-based inhouse team, he got a letter from an aspiring Ukrainian programmer willing to work for them.  Having proved his high level of expertise, the guy introduced Yoav to more skilled PHP developers and couple months later Yoav met them in Kiev. establishing the first Ukrainian development office.  By now there are 240 people working there.

3. Magento’s name and logo are considered to be inspired by tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. Varien had to abandon the originally planned ‘Bento’ due to a naming conflict with FileMaker Inc. who had already trademarked this name. Magento is believed to be a mix of Bento and Mage. The latter is the term from Dungeons & Dragons meaning ‘Wizard’.

4. Varien faced the real flood of money with the launch of Magento Enterprise edition, based on Open source, as well as Community edition. It offered new modules and advanced functionality along with customer support. Since its launch in May 2009 within first 3 months Magento has signed over 60 clients and that was just the beginning.

5. The company requires extremely strong PHP knowledge from its development staff. Thus, their average junior PHP developer is equal to a middle and sometimes even senior level in other companies.  

6. In 2010 eBay made a $90 million investment in Magento, worth a 49% ownership share of the company. A year later, they acquired the rest of it for $180 millions. In 2015, eBay announced that it has sold eBay Enterprise (which includes the Magento product) to a group of investors for $925 millions. The buyers are Sterling Partners, Longview Asset Management and Innotrac Corp., along with companies owned by the Permira Funds. As a result of the breakup of eBay, Magento was spun out as an independent company by the new owner Permira private equity fund on November 3, 2015.

7. As you install the Magento base, you get a default theme from Magento. If you want an advanced functionality and a custom theme, go to Magento Connect, claimed to be the largest eCommerce application marketplace out there. By Dec 2016 it stores 9706 Magento extensions both free and paid ones.

8. The most expensive Magento extension is SAP ECC / R3 integration with the staggering cost of €25,000.00. It allows you to fully synchronize all transactional data between SAP and Magento. Right, all SAP-related tweaks will cost you a bundle.

9. Magento 2 has been coming to us since 2014 (Developer Beta) to Nov. 2015 with Merchant General Availability thus when the world finally saw Magento 2.0. The team confirmed it on 17 Dec 2015 in the official announcement:

“Today we announced the general availability of our next generation open source digital commerce platform, Magento 2.0. The new platform empowers brands, retailers, and businesses across B2C and B2B industries to quickly and cost-effectively deliver engaging omnichannel shopping experiences”. - A New Era of Commerce Innovation

10. Over 200,000 businesses have chosen the Magento platform for launching their websites. Among the world’s leading brands there are Samsung, Ford, Olympus, Nike, North Face and others.

So here they are, 10 facts about Magento most people never knew. But you do know☺. We hope you liked it! Can you tell more? We’d love to hear from you!