Magento eCommerce – Variants, Benefits and Fit for your Online Store
If you have ever tried to measure the progress of your online business, chances are that your primary metrics have revolved around your traffic, sources, conversion rates, and customer engagement. Fair enough. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the success of these factors should be largely attributed to the eCommerce platform you operate with.
From the abundant choices available in the market today, Magento eCommerce platform has fast emerged to dominate the enterprise eCommerce platform landscape in recent years. It is currently adopted by 12% of all eCommerce sites and powers 1.2% of the internet.
As per the official data released by Magento, there are over 250,000 merchants who are operating their business using Magento, including some of the biggest names like Christian Louboutin, Ford, HP Inc., and Nike. Last year, Gartner positioned Magento as a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Platforms research report. It is the third consecutive year that Magento eCommerce has been named a Leader—a win that demonstrates the platform’s steady growth, robustness, and cutting edge technology.
Magento Open Source vs. Magento Commerce Platform – The Difference Magento Open Source: Known as Magento Community in the past, Magento Open Source is the free version of Magento that is available for everyone to download, customize, and self-host. The users can also access several extensions and themes. Open Source had been the preferred choice of several small and mid-size businesses. Magento Commerce: There were earlier two versions of Magento, Magento Enterprise, and Magento Enterprise Cloud. However, now it is a single version – Magento Commerce, which is also a premium version for higher support levels and a broad range of functionalities. As far as the Magento eCommerce pricing is concerned, the license fees start from $24,000 for a year for Magento 2 and allow more features, customer reward programs, targeted promotions, and 24/7 support. Additionally, businesses can choose either an on-premise deployment or host the solution on a cloud.
Benefits of Magento eCommerce Platform for your Business The open-source platform has shown to significantly drive impact and sales, making it the preferred choice for marketers and developers. Magento eCommerce
solution is easy to deploy, offers enhanced security (DevSecOps approach), and most importantly, provides customers with an improved shopping experience. It is little surprising then that Magento has evolved over the last decade to become one of the most sought after platforms with persistent improvements and upgrades— Magento2 being one of them.
1. Customizable Magento lets you customize almost everything from the look of your website to the design of the categories and offerings. Being an open-source platform, it also offers numerous plugins, including those for accounting, payment, processing, and shipping.
Magento tools are beginning to take advantage of the Adobe intelligence layer they call Sensei. They use it in conjunction with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to collect data and offer more personalized recommendations.
However, the design themes by Magento may not be relevant if you wish to heavily customize your site. In that case, you might want to code from scratch. Many businesses partner with Magento developers to build a site that caters to their specific business needs and products. Magento supports 3rd party integrations
such as payment gateways as well, making it the favored choice of many leading enterprises.
2. SEO Friendly What better than using a platform that encourages organic traffic? Magento is super-efficient for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which subsequently leads to better visibility for your products on Google.
Magento scores a perfect 100 out of 100 in the search engine optimization domain.
Additionally, the websites created with Magento are mobile responsive hence compatible with all screen sizes and browsers—this can get you better rankings on search results too, which is a huge plus. Some of the Magento web platform features include SEO friendly URL, meta descriptions, sitemaps, positioning layer, and tags that help you rank higher, and buyers find you faster.
3. Scalable Scalability tops the objectives of any eCommerce platform, and Magento significantly assists this by offering hassle-free launches, efficient product migration, and so on. Regardless of the number of stores you plan to have, all the data is stored and managed at a single backend office. It also uses one of the most robust caching tools, Varnish (fastest reverse proxy and HTTP accelerators), that improves the site performance and helps scale up the online stores.
Varnish delivers web content 300% to 1000% faster, with a reduction of backend server load of up to 89% while handling unlimited numbers of simultaneous visitors.
Magento partners also update their extensions frequently, adding to its flexibility feature, which is exceptional for any enterprise eCommerce platform. Magento is built to support your business journey and growth at all stages.
4. Flexible Flexibility allows greater scope for experimentation and innovation. Magento eCommerce platform offers developers total authority over several functions while
working on the eCommerce store. Apart from the scope to come up with unique experiences for users, developers can also customize the website’s backend based on the demands of the business. Additionally, Magento 2 is supported by a robust, next-generation architecture to offer even more flexibility while building the online shop. This eventually means a seamless customer experience and engagement for the end-users.
5. Easy to Integrate To boost sales and ensure a pleasant shopping experience for the buyer, an eCommerce website needs to add multiple services such as data applications, logistics, shipping, order tracking, payment gateways, and so on. Integrating with these third party services is quick and easy with Magento eCommerce platform. The platform also allows businesses to add Google tools, including Analytics and Checkout, to obtain an in-depth understanding of the website’s performance and the ongoing market trends. The ease of integration with back-end systems and robust API’s help speed up the business’s time to market.
Magento vs Shopify vs WooCommerce vs BigCommerce vs Volusion It’s always helpful to be aware of what each platform offers while deciding on the right fit for your eCommerce business. Here’s a quick comparison of the five major eCommerce platforms in the business with their pros and cons.
Why Magento is best eCommerce Platform – Magento 2 Features
Magento 2 offers a highly robust experience with several new features. To experience
greater
user
engagement,
smooth
navigation,
scalability,
customization, and other Magento eCommerce features that Magento 2 offers, it’s imperative that businesses undertake the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration at the earliest.
1. Better Customer Experience Carts abandonments no more! Magento 2 simplifies shopping, quickens checkouts, and even allows first-time customers to complete their registration after they have placed an order. A notable addition is the display of the chosen product images on the final order page that eliminates ordering errors and subsequently reduces returns. Also, the checkout steps offer order details at every step, making it easier for customers to access it anytime.
2. Improved Admin Interface Magento 2’s highly responsive interface, allows users to browse without having to encounter too many steps and options. Unlike Magento 1, you don’t require to click multiple tabs to create a product on the product pages. Moreover, it offers default options to add videos from various channels. Multiple administrators can work on the website parallelly with Magento 2, ensuring better efficiency, especially for stores with heavy traffic and numerous products.
3. Faster Loading Time Magento 2 comes with reindexing, a process to transform data such as products and categories to improve the store performance. The indexing strategy is used to transform merchant data like catalog data, prices, users, stores, etc. by creating index tables and updating them regularly to help improve the query speed and the performance of the web store. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Not with Magento 2, which can handle up to 10 million page views every hour.
4. Enhanced Technical Architecture and Features The Magento 2 file structure has been simplified with a single folder for all the codes required for extensions. With improved architecture, it is more convenient to upgrade and maintain Magento 2 as compared to 1. It also has more features such as color swatches and API admin panel making Magento 2 integration with API functionality much easier.
Challenges while Adopting Magento eCommerce Platform (and Solutions) Like every platform, Magento eCommerce platform also puts forth a few challenges that need to be considered to make a well-informed decision. Here are some of the complications that need attention:
1. Slower on Smaller Servers Magento usually offers a faster page load unless your store is being run on shared hosting. In that case, the speed can considerably slow down and hamper the user experience since Magento consists of 20000+ files and 200 database tables.
Solution: Employ a dedicated hosting server that is specialized for Magento. Additionally, hiring Magento developers who can solve the issue efficiently for you should be the best way forward.
2. Technical Support Security threats and downtimes are an ugly reality of the digital world and require urgent attention. When using Magento for your eCommerce store there may be instances where you fail to fetch a quick response related to your concerns and hence face a delay in the subsequent resolutions. Solution: Magento forum can be of significant assistance here where members post their queries and obtain help from the vast online community. Moreover collaborating with a professional Magento website development company can help you with support options such as Pay As You Go (suitable for smaller enterprises) and monthly support (ideal for larger businesses).
3. Complicated for Starters Magento is built on the Zend framework using MVC approach and comes with a vast array of customizations and capabilities. For beginners, the process of building their store on Magento using these options may be a tough task due to complex and layered codes. The platform undoubtedly offers a greater creative scope but, at the same time, is a challenge to navigate through.
Solution: Collaborating with trained and skilled developers can lead to building a great product within the specified time and budget. It is extremely important that businesses focus on hiring the right partners when building their Magento eCommerce store.
Endnote Businesses in today’s retail market demand an eCommerce platform that can help them take the competition head-on. And, it is safe to say that managing building and scaling an enterprise is highly advantageous with the Magento eCommerce platform.
Magento’s stellar growth and popularity can be credited to the numerous features mentioned above in this article that have made it a favorite of merchants, developers, and customers alike. Magento’s success lies in the plethora of features, platforms, designs and themes, customization, and flexibility that it offers. Having said that, a successful Magento eCommerce development is also the result of the collaboration with the right developers and partners whose skill and expertise can ensure a seamless website.
Source - https://www.netsolutions.com/insights/magento-ecommerce-platform/