Muniza AshrafThe digital landscape has enabled businesses to have an online presence allowing customers to browse, order, and receive goods with a few clicks. However, as easy it has become for consumers to shop online, launching and managing an enterprise eCommerce experience isn’t easy.
From the get-go, you are not only dealing with online promotions for maximum visibility and reach, but you are also getting an influx of customers, abandoned carts, and orders that need processing. So, in order to manage all the operations smoothly, you need to rely on a solid ecommerce software solution. There are many in the market, but Magento specifically has been a popular choice for a number of reasons.
What exactly is Magento?
In short, it is an eCommerce platform. Now, going into the details, it is an open-source PHP-based ecommerce platform enabling cohesive ecommerce website development and harbors one of the finest and most popular content management systems (CMS) for online shops globally. In addition, it provides online merchants with a flexible and easy-to-use shopping cart system; which is one of the most important features for any online store.
Magento can be regarded as a complete unit as it also provides powerful marketing tools, search engine optimization facilities, and catalog-management tools.
Mega brands like Ford, Bulgari, and the likes of Christian Louboutins use Magento. Moreover, this ecommerce platform is powering 1% of the internet; which gives you a rough idea about the plethora of sites that are running on Magento. And why wouldn’t they? You are getting a lot of value from an open-source free platform.
If we speak in numbers than Megnento has a great record. One that places a Magento development company in high demand and its certified Magento experts one of the sought after resources in the ecommerce market.
Let’s have a look at some of the promising Magento statistics.
Magento Opensource Vs Magento Commerce
There are two versions of Magento currently available, one as discussed is the opensource version while the other is the premium version. Let’s learn about them more.
Magento Opensource: Magento Open Source is the free version that can be downloaded, customized and even self-hosted. It was formerly called Magento Community. It is excellent for all small-scale businesses. Moreover, Open Source Magento comes with a vast range of extensions and themes supported by its large community.
Magento Commerce: The former two versions Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud have been combined, giving us Magento Commerce. It is a premium version that comes with a yearly subscription fee; which includes cloud-hosting. Additional features and perks that come with the paid version involve advance marketing features, customer reward programs, and 24/7 technical support.
The prices for Magento 2 starts from $22, 000/ year. And as customers, you have two options to go for:
- On-Premise Deployment
- Cloud-Hosted Solution
The cloud-hosted solution comes at a heftier price, but with the benefit of a SaaS ecommerce solution.
Why Choose Magento?
Because of its many features that assist you in not only developing a great site but help set-up and run an entire store through easy-to-use features and functionalities that do not require one to be tech-savvy. So what are those features we speak about?
Basic Features of Magento:
Client Account: What is an online store without a client account? Magento’s client account gives additional information that includes: Account status, transaction log, preferences, personal information among other things.
Payment Ecosystem: It provides you with many options to give to your customers; like credit card, PayPal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net, and supports external payment gateways, such as ePay, eWAY, and such.
Inventory Management: Import, export and how many products are in stock, etc.
Customer Service: Email service, customer contact form, follow-up features, and more.
Category Management: Placing items in the right category, and selection of products by category selection.
Product Management: Managing products through inventory, images, product reviews, favorites list, so on, and so forth.
Search Feature: Fast search support on Google Site Map
Order Management: Orders, invoices, shipments, credit memos, transactions, and billing agreements.
Promotional and Marketing Tools: Promotions, communications, advertising channels, SEO & Search, user content, and customer engagement.
Analyze and Report: Google Analytics integration option.
Other Features Setting Magento Apart From Other Ecommerce Platforms
Magento isn’t perfect and has its share of drawbacks, but they do not overshine the many benefits it presents for businesses of all scales. Some of them are:
Magento Mobile: Mobile-First Responsive Design
Smartphone technology has advanced to unprecedented amounts and as become the ultimate go-to technology for the consumers. Most of their menial to heavier tasks are performed on mobiles, including online shopping.
Hence, Magento is known for its high mobile web design standards. Both of its versions support the HTML5 platform to provide a comfortable and optimized mobile shopping experience. Magento Mobile has the consumers that use smartphones to connect with online stores, all sorted.
Smooth Multi-Platform Integration
We spoke about customization and Magento allows third-party add-ons and modules to be integrated with Magento store. So far, there are any strict restrictions and shop owners can make use of third-party integrations like Mail Chimp, Paypal, eBay, and Google Analytics to aid their business even further.
Magento SEO: SEO-friendly CMS
Magento SEO contains several great features like sitemaps, meta descriptions, keywords, product title, layered navigation, search-friendly URLs, and meta tags. What more is the ecommerce platform giant keeps SEO ranking factors up to date. In addition to providing great URL structure and meta-implementation options, it includes analytics that helps owners keep track of web visitors.
Speed Optimization
In order to stay ahead of the game, your site’s pages should load faster or else you will lose your visitor to your many competitors. Magento has that area covered as it is known for high-quality speed optimized web pages that load instantly.
Secure Platform
Normally open-source software solutions pose security threats. However, Magento’s extensive community that is comprised of developers, shopkeepers, brokers, consultants, and many more can affirm its reliability and security.
Freedom Over Hosting Services
Retailers are not bound to one hosting and have the freedom to select hosting companies of their choice. This leaves the owners in control of their business.
These were some key differences that have set Magento apart from the many ecommerce platforms. Recently, Magento declared that it will be halting support for Magento 1 after June 2020 – which leaves only one option – migrating to Magento 2. Although this seems like alot of hassle, the right software development companies are providing special support throughout the migration.
Magento continues to play the key role in running the majority of online businesses and that too successfully. So hopefully this knowledge will help you make the right decision in choosing an ecommerce platform for your business.
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