As online consumer’s behavior is now changing dramatically, a numerous ecommerce platforms have been developed to support for store owners. Among those solutions, Magento is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the world. It is used by more than 250,000 merchants all around the globe. Magento gives store owners the flexibility to customize and extend their platform to create unique, divergent shopping experiences. The platform also adapts fast, and stay ahead of changes in customer buying patterns.
This article will provide you an overview of Magento. It answers the two main questions: “What is Magento?” and “What does it provide?”. Also, its pros and cons will be analyzed for the sake of business owners.
What is Magento?
Magento is an open source ecommerce platform written in PHP. It was officially launched on March 31, 2008. And now it has become a leading enterprise-class eCommerce platform, being chosen by 1 of every 4 online businesses.
For users’ convenience, Magento currently comes in three versions: Magento Community Edition (CE), Magento Enterprise Edition (EE), and Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition (ECE). These three editions have their own characteristics that fit various requirements of firms in many fields with different sizes. A more detailed comparison of this trio is available in another topic on our blog page.
What does Magento provide?
A robust ecommerce platform with powerful capabilities
It has a framework system with numerous tools that offer customers the freedom to shape it completely based on their own needs. In other words, the platform offers merchants a complete flexibility and the ability to control over the website appearance and the functionality in their online stores. In its intuitive administration interface, Magento allows admins to freely manage not only the content but also the powerful sales, marketing, and merchandising tools:
Products management:
- Catalog: Through this section, Magento users can create new products with related information for their online stores. There are six types of product that Magento offers. They are Simple Product, Bundle Product, Configurable Product, Grouped Product, Virtual Product, and Downloadable Product.
- Categories: Magento allows users to sort out numerous products into different categories. This function not only helps the store owner to built an organized store but also supports the shoppers find what they’re looking for quickly. With these tools, you can absolutely create sites that meet their unique business needs.
Sales management:
- Orders: All the orders information are listed in the Orders section, including their status (pending, processing, completed, or canceled), number of items purchased, and others. The admin can also create new orders in the backend of Magento.
- Shipping and Payment: Magento comes up with the ability to accept purchase orders and money orders through different payment gateways. It also features out-of-the-box integrations with PayPal Payment Solutions, Braintree, and Authorize.net. Currently, there are more than 50 payment gateways that store owners can use for Magento 2.0, including: Beanstream Payment, Square Payments, Sage Pay Suite Pro, and Realex Payments.
Marketing management:
- Promotions: With the catalog price rules and cart price rules, Magento allows users to create flexible coupon codes to attract customers. They can also divide customers into different groups in order to have appropriate marketing policy for each group and maximize benefits.
- SEO & Search: Understanding the importance of search engine marketing, Magento offers a lot of SEO tools for shop owners. . They are Google XML Site Map, friendly URLs, and meta-information field. With the Meta-information field, Magento allows users to write meta-data for products, categories, and content pages.These tools can significantly help store owners to improve the ranking of website in search result.
High scalability and optimal performance
Magento Enterprise Edition offers its users a combination of exclusive features to optimize marketing and analytical techniques. These functions are available both in the backend and frontend of the platform, using to improve administration options. With the 2.x.x version, Magento has significantly improved its loading speed as well as delivered better performance. This helps Magento store owners to improve their store performance as well as the shopping experience of their customers.
Magento can absolutely scale up your online business. Thanks to the multiple master databases, admins can add capacity to wherever they need to handle a lot of shifting workloads across checkout process, products, and orders. This helps to generate optimal performance for the stores. According to the main website of Magento developer, merchants using Magento grow 3X faster, on average, than those on other competitive platforms. They also realized a 50% reduction in their total cost of ownership during the operating time.
Great customer service and technical support
In its essence, Magento is quite a complex system for users. Fortunately, the instruction and tutorial materials are available on Magento’s official website. The support avenues that Magento provides including Magento Forums, Documentation, Sales Portal, General Information, and User Guide. Store owners can visit these websites to get more instruction and guidelines, generating the most benefit from their ecommerce businesses. In addition, store owners can generate help through paid assistance from many Magento Agencies or Magento Solution companies like BSSGeek
In summary, Magento is an open source e-commerce platform that is regarded as best choice by firms of different scale and experts from various industries. Its extensive features and complete customizability make it an excellent platform for merchants who want to boost sale and raise their competitive advantage in the market. Though the required resource and investment may be higher comparing to other platforms, however, the result will go beyond your expectation..
