Why choose Magento for your e Commerce website?
For an online business, it is important to choose an eCommerce platform very carefully. It can be extremely difficult to choose the appropriate solution considering the vast amount of options available on the market nowadays. A quick google search for available eCommerce solutions results in just under 60 popular solutions.
Out of these, Magento, Prestashop, WooCommerce, Opencart and osCommerce have the major market share. At Absolute, we have had our fair share of experience in building eCommerce solutions in these platforms, and here is our opinion on why we favour Magento above all others.
Enterprise and open source Community editions
Magento has 2 editions. The Enterprise Edition, which is mainly aimed at large businesses needing lots of enterprise-class features to suit extensive requirements. The second option is the Community Edition, which is open source and free to download. We recommend that small - medium scale businesses use the community edition.
Rich set of features to match most of the business needs
The extensive set of features pre-loaded in Magento, make it a breeze to customise the application to match the majority of business needs. The admin interface is very user friendly for average users to manage the CMS. Below are some of the common features.
- Product catalogues with the facility to create a variety of product types - simple products, configurable products, downloadable products etc.
- Multi-tier price system which allows variable prices based on the customer group
- Extendable product attributes
- Flexible product categorization
- Product up-sell and cross-sell options
- Reviews and tagging
- Rule based catalogue and shopping cart promotions allow us to offer a wide variety of promotional offers to our customers, based on a multitude of product subsets
- Efficient order and customer management
- Options to define Tax rules, shipping and payment options and the facility to integrate third party providers
- Magento allows us to customise most of the ecommerce features through the configuration options.
Community Support and Extension Library
Community support is an integral part of the development of every open source platform. Magento has a strong community base, where most common issues are discussed and resolved. Magento Connect, the extension library provides lots of pre-built solutions to further extend the available features to match any specific needs for the business.
Unlimited flexibility to extend the frontend and backend features
As with any eCommerce CMS, we need the flexibility to extend and customize the features of the out of the box solution to match our needs. This is why we primarily consider Magento for ecommerce website development. The theme and skin customization features allow the developers to implement both the business needs and the web design needs equally, without affecting any of the core system files. The theme and skin override features are great for building a rich browsing experience. The override feature is applicable to extensions as well.
Integration with third party systems
This is one of the best features required for any business. In addition to linking to payment gateways and shipping carriers, it allows us to build or integrate other solutions. Integrating with other sales channels like eBay, Amazon and other marketplaces, ensures that your business can grow and develop quickly, by providing extra revenue without the need to worry about managing another backend system. The secure and flexible Web Service features which come with Magento are definitely an added advantage when comparing other solutions. This facilitates Magento to be the data feed even for EPOS systems.
Multi store and Multi language features
One of its most praised features is the multi-store facility. A Magento store can serve multiple websites or stores with different design and features (and even products) but work from the same installation. We can configure the stores to be served from separate domain names. And then after that, we can configure pretty much everything unique to that store, including Tax rules, language, customers, products etc.
SEO and Marketing
Having an online store on the web alone won’t drive sales to the business. That’s why SEO is a serious consideration in Magento. The built-in Google Analytics feature is one way to monitor the sites performance, and basic marketing tools such as newsletters are also included. However, we can extend these features again using third-party components such as abandoned shopping cart follow up emails. Also the catalogue promotion features and discount codes make for happy and repeat customers.
Analysis and Reporting
Basic reporting and analysis tools are provided with Magento. But reports like abandoned cart and products in cart features give us some insights to review the product pricing etc. Search term analysis is another useful feature to find the most wanted products etc.
Security, Scalability and Performance
Security should be one of the most important features to consider when money and personal data are involved. Magento supports HTTPS, for secure transactions. The permission based user management system enables us to create users with varied roles to access the admin interface. This role based permission is also applicable to external API’s. Magento is highly scalable and is tuned for performance. The caching features give developers freedom to control the performance for serving pages. In addition to the theme output caching, CSS, JavaScript and image caching is also provided. But as with any complex applications, an appropriate hosting environment is also a must for a better shopping experience.
Mobile Commerce
As mobile commerce is growing exponentially these days, one of the best considerations in Magento platform is the built-in mobile commerce features. Built in support for mobile applications allows you to build apps for your online store. Around 1.2 billion people are accessing the web from their mobile devices these days. Therefore the benefits of building your ecommerce store as a mobile responsive website are pretty self-explanatory!
Magento is owned by eBay Inc.
Last but least, as Magento is owned by one of the most experienced global leaders in the retail industry, eBay. We can expect that the solutions offered under their leadership, will have the features for the best eCommerce solution.
Conclusion
Magento is a very powerful ecommerce system. If you are thinking of starting a serious business and you can see the future possibilities of growth, it’s definitely worth investing in Magento. If you are an already established business looking to change platforms, whilst doing your homework and comparing platforms, we would suggest that you strongly consider Magento as one of the front runners.