The e-commerce or electronic commerce landscape is evolving like never before. In this day and age, where the internet has emerged as a global power, no business can survive without its help. The internet harnesses the world together -most enterprises have already realized this understood the lasting impact and the massive business potential and hence emerged with an online presence in today’s market.
In this internet age, convenience is king and so customers enjoy shopping from the comfort of their homes every day. They constantly look for more platforms to have the most seamless and hassle-free shopping experience they can find. This has given rise to severe competition within the e-commerce landscape.
The cut-throat competition owing to the growth of e-commerce has made it imperative for businesses to put forth only the best on the table. Customers are not short of options. If they witness any shortcomings in their shopping experience with one online store, they take no time in abandoning the website and exploring another. Hence, your online retail store should be nothing but the best in terms of its design, features, navigation, and every other facet related to it.
The e-commerce platform you use is one of the most important metrics that determine the success or failure of your business online. As it directly affects the traffic you receive, the conversion rate, and customer engagement, it is imperative to use the best e-commerce platform to operate a retail website. And, when talking about e-commerce platforms, Magento e-commerce is always at the position of prominence.
Magento e-commerce provides a web hosting platform to businesses, which doesn’t just allow them to embrace the online marketplace but sustain it too. With its unsurpassable features, admirable structure, and user-friendly navigation, it makes it easy for businesses to make it big into the e-commerce landscape.
It is owned by Adobe Inc. It provides open-source e-commerce solutions to online retail stores. The best thing about it is that you can edit and use it at your convenience. It offers several customization options like extensions and plugins that can be acquired from third-party developers or the Magento community.
As of now, Magento is the power behind 29.89% of online stores and 1.2% of the internet. According to the data released by Magento, more than 250,000 retailers operate their business online using this platform. Popular brands like Nike Samsung, Ford, Lenovo, Foxconnect, Christian Louboutin, HP Inc., Olympus, Nestle, Vizio, Men’s Health, etc., use Magento e-commerce CMS, making it the most used platform for an e-commerce website.
Magento came into being in early 2007. It released its first public beta version on August 31, 2007. Varien, the company that owned Magento wanted to divide osCommerce but instead, went on rewriting it as Magento.
Magento earned several awards within the first few years, like the “SourceForge Community Choice Awards” and “Best of Open Source Software Awards”.
In 2010, eBay made an investment in the platform acquiring 49% ownership share of Magento. Later, in 2011, eBay acquired the rest of the company to join its X Commerce initiative.
After a series of events entailing the parting of Yoav Kutner and the breakup of eBay, Magento emerged as an independent brand under its new owner Permira private equity fund in November 2015.
In 2018, Adobe acquired Magento for $1.68bn to integrate it into Adobe Experience Cloud, an Enterprise CMS platform.
Magento open source or Magento community is the free version of this platform that can be accessed by anyone. You can download it, customize it, and self-host it without paying a penny. You can also access the themes and extensions of the platform. It is apt for small-size and mid-side enterprises.
Magento Commerce, on the other hand, is a premium version of this platform. Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud were the earlier versions of this platform.
With more functions and features, it provides a higher support level to businesses. Of course, it is not a free version. The license fees for Magento Commerce starts from $24,000 for one year for Magento 2.
Magento 2 provides more features, targeted promotions, customer reward programs, and 24-hour customer support. Furthermore, you can either host the solution on the cloud or opt for on-premise deployment.
The reason behind the massive popularity of the Magento e-commerce platform is the features it offers. Let us walk you through the most celebrated features of Magento-
Catalog is the most important component for any online store, be it selling apparel, accessories, cosmetics, or electronics. E-commerce Magento extends excellent features in this respect. It allows you to download digital products like videos, music, etc., and supports virtual products. It provides you with customization options like watermarking and resizing, lets you delete or edit product reviews, and export and import products for batch update offline.
It provides your out-and-out inventory management solutions.
Needless to say, no e-commerce website can flourish without SEO. SEO helps your website get higher visibility among competitors and convert your leads into sales.
The SEO features extended by the Magento e-commerce platform helps you to easily integrate your SEO strategy to get higher rankings in the search engine.
Features like Google sitemap generation, easy meta-tagging of products and information, quick loading options (like meager use of .css and .js files), etc., meet your SEO needs. Furthermore, this platform supports search engine-friendly URLs and sorts and modifies popular searches, helping you derive most from your SEO strategies.
With the Magento e-commerce platform, you don’t just get a seamless online store but additional perks like marketing, promotions, and conversions. The advertising and marketing tools of Magento make it easy for you to stimulate your sales.
E-commerce Magento allows you to distribute coupon codes across newsletters, email, and even offline. It lets you manage newsletter and polls, and monitor coupon usage. It offers extensive landing page tools for PPC, URL tools, and promotional tools for new products.
The order management system of Magento e-commerce is commendable. It provides you ample options like creating, editing, viewing, and fulfilling orders straight from the admin panel. It facilitates making multiple invoices, shipments, as well as credit memos per order. It allows you to print shipping labels, packing slips, and invoices.
It makes it easy for you to keep a track of your orders with email notification and RSS feed for new orders. Moreover, it provides call center support.
Site management features of Magento commerce allow you to control multiple stores and websites within one installation. You can control sites from the admin panel and share required information. Other features in this respect include templates with customizable Magento design, multiple languages and currency options, captcha enabled websites, integration with third-party apps, etc.
Magento e-commerce platform offers features that make it easy for you to manage your account and optimize it to suit your needs. It has an easy-to-understand account dashboard and provides newsletter subscription management. It allows you to store numerous addresses, check recent orders, status, and history, and save a wish list along with comments.
While choosing a platform for e-commerce, one pays the maximum amount of attention to shipping and payment-related features. Magento e-commerce provides an array of checkout, shipping, and payment options to integrate on the website.
Whether you want a website with a single-page checkout model or SSL security support for your front-end and back-end orders, you get it all with e-commerce Magento.
Furthermore, you also get estimates for shipping costs and shopping cart tax, and integration with Authorize.net and Paypal.
Magento e-commerce offers abundant features for tracking, analyzing, as well as reporting. They include Google Analytics, total sales and refunded invoice, sales and tax reports, product review reports, low stock reports, and abandoned shopping cart reports. All these features help you to track your progress and optimize your Magento web design and features as per.
With Magento e-commerce, you get excellent back-end tools to optimize your customer support. The features include Contact Us form, order tracking, email updates, history, support from domestic and international currencies, tax rates, options for international site registration, payment, and shipping destination, and EU cookie notification.
All these features enhance your customer service and international support service.
Without a doubt, Magento is the best platform for e-commerce. If you are looking for reasons to use it for your online retail store, let us help you in this respect. Here is why you should choose the Magento e-commerce website for your online store.
The very first reason that gives Magento an edge over other websites for e-commerce is that it is open-source. This means you can use it to your advantage without shelling a penny.
CE, i.e., the Magento Community Edition is completely free. You can install and use any version you want. The features and functions of Magento allow you to enhance the performance of your online website and promote it across a wider audience base.
The Magento Connect/Marketplace houses n numbers of modules that can be used to accelerate and track your progress.
You can be a part of the Magento Community and gel with leading developers, programmers, CEOs, project managers, bloggers, product managers, etc. These people nurture the community, and you can imbibe as much as you want from them.
If, while developing your Magento e-commerce website, you face any issue, you can reach out to the members of the Magento Community for help. The experts troubleshoot your issues and provide you with proper guidelines and quick fixes. Moreover, the regular tips and updates always keep you on the same page with other developers.
The members go extra lengths to ensure that everyone goes strong with their website developing game.
No business, be it small or large, brick-and-mortar or online, can grow without a robust support system. With Magento e-commerce, you get a sturdy support system.
The e-commerce Magento technical support team always stays at your disposal. The support is further amplified by the active community of developers that keep you covered in terms of stability, security, and support.
With Magento, you can rest assured of the performance. With the help of minimal server resources, you can achieve optimum performance for your e-commerce Magento website.
The quick page loading and query processing time put Magento websites in the favorite list of the users and create a win-win situation for you. Magento, in conjunction with other latest technologies like Redis, Varnish, FDC, Memcached, and other optimized database options facilitates quick dynamic, as well as static operations making your clients happy and business booming.
With the Magento commerce website, you get the authority to control everything. Being a Magento developer, you can control all the functions of your e-commerce website.
Right from the Magento website design to the back-end functions, you can customize everything as per your needs. You can curate a marvelous frontend for access on multiple devices. This is not it. If you select Magento for developing your e-commerce website, you get to control the interfaces as well as the processing capabilities of the core solutions of your website.
Magento makes multitasking easy. The Magento web design and functions make it easy for you to take care of more than one task at a time.
You can track the performance of your Magento website while doing multiple important tasks simultaneously. Hence, it saves your time.
It also allows developers and merchants to manage an array of things like customer information, billings, etc with a single, user-friendly, and smooth admin panel that CMS provides.
The biggest benefit of using the Magento commerce website is that you can easily integrate it with a plethora of third-party website services, like database applications, payment gateways, order tracking, shipping, transportation, etc.
Furthermore, it provides you with several built-in tools like Google Checkout, Google Analytics, and Google Base to keep an eye on the latest trends of Magento e-commerce, while also tracking the performance of your website.
The importance of SEO in e-commerce is paramount, and Magento CMS is not an exception.
With Magento e-commerce, you can tap into the right SEO strategies for the growth of your business. It offers you features like SEO-friendly URL structure, positioning layer, sitemaps, tags, descriptions, URL rewrites, etc.
These features make it easy for you to curate a robust SEO strategy and to make your website rank high across various search engines.
Several factors contribute to the popularity of e-commerce Magento but one of the most substantial factors is its compatibility with mobile phones. It is no doubt that the online world is dominated by mobile. If numbers are to be believed, around 60% of online buyers place their orders using a mobile phone. To prosper in the business, the business owners must optimize their business for the mobile-savvy customers.
The compatibility of Magento e-commerce websites with smartphones makes it the most favored website for e-commerce.
Magento supports HTML5 for smartphones. The seamless Magento design on mobile phones enhances the shopping experience. It adjusts the size of the images and supports videos to make them suitable for small screens of smartphones. The built-in drag and drop feature further enhances the experience.
The reason why Magento strikes the right chords with e-commerce is that it has been developed for the same. It is the default CMS for every kind of online business.
The Magento developers have developed it to cater to the needs of e-commerce websites, and hence, there is no chance of anything going wrong with the Magento e-commerce website. It offers a complete range of e-commerce solutions. Right from the Magento website design to features, everything serves the purpose of the website designers and shoppers as well.
While Magento e-commerce extends the most phenomenal features for e-commerce website design and development, Magento 2 provides several additional features to make the user experience much better.
Magento 2 promises smoother navigation, better stability, more user engagement, and better customization apart from the regular features proffered by the Magento e-commerce platform.
Read further to know why Magento 2 is the e-commerce platform of choice for you.
E-commerce websites that run on Magento offer excellent customer experience but Magento 2 takes the experience several notches higher. With a simplified shopping experience and quick check-outs, it considerably reduces the chances of cart abandonment. Moreover, it allows the first-time customers to shop and place their order without tying them up in the compulsion of registration.
Another lauded feature that enhances the shopping experience is the display of the products on the final order page. It helps in eliminating ordering errors and reduces the chances of returns.
With order details displayed on every checkout step, customers can access it anytime they want.
E-commerce Magento 2 has a very responsive interface. It allows you to browse seamlessly without encountering too many complicated steps or options.
While with Magento 1, the user had to click on multiple tabs to create a product on the pages, Magento 2 keeps it easy and simple. Plus, you get default options to add videos from different channels.
Magento 2 allows multiple administrators to work on the website simultaneously to manage heavy traffic and many products. This assures better efficiency.
Reindexing is a process that transforms data like categories or products to enhance the store performance. Magento 2 comes loaded with this feature. The indexing strategy transforms merchant data, such as catalog data, users, stores, prices, etc. by forming index tables. It updates them regularly and optimizes the performance of the web store as well as query speed.
Numbers say that 40% of shoppers abandon a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Quick loading time ensures that a customer stays on your website and completes the payment process without getting irritated.
Technically talking, Magento 2 comes with a simplified file structure featuring a single folder for the codes needed for extension. The better technical framework can be maintained and upgraded in a much better way as compared to Magento 1.
Furthermore, it comes with many added features like API admin panel, color swatches, etc.
All these features make Magento 2 a much better and technically-advanced platform for e-commerce websites.
No business wishes to lose its customer to others, hence, they make sure to have an online store that satiates the needs of their loyal customers and impress potential customers. Using Magento e-commerce website helps them do both and allows businesses to reach their business goals faster.
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