By Do you know,
Magento powers about 12 % of all eCommerce sites on the Internet?
Magento is the second most sought-after eCommerce platform worldwide?
Magento powers 16% of The Top 10K Web Stores?
The global online eCommerce sales on Magento are expected to increase to $224 billion by 2020?
Surprised by these facts? These and there are many other things that you need to know about Magento.
As selling online is a challenging venture, you need to be more careful and intelligent when choosing the eCommerce platform. If Magento is your preference, you must know everything about this platform to ensure the right selection and investment.
We will help you make acquaintance with some key points about Magento through this quick guide. At the end of this article, you will understand why Magento is best for your eCommerce store and how your investment will be worth it.
Magento Commerce Vs Magento Opensource
Firstly, you must know the difference between Magento Opensource and Magento Commerce. Many think Magento Opensource as a cost-effective solution to build an eCommerce store. But, choosing Magento Commerce can make a huge difference for any eCommerce business.
Let’s see basic differences between both versions to understand which is the best choice for an eCommerce store.
| Magento Opensource | Magento Commerce |
| Also known as Magento Community, Magento open source is a free Magento version that can be downloaded, configured, and self-hosted. | Magento Commerce is a premium version that requires cloud-hosting as part of the subscription fee. |
| It offers access to a wide range of themes and extensions and is supported by a growing community. | It offers more functionality, including customer reward programs, advanced marketing features, and targeted promotions. |
| Magento Opensource doesn’t offer all the features required by an eCommerce store. | Magento Commerce offers an entire range of basic and advanced features to build a highly-functional eCommerce store |
| It doesn’t offer expert technical support. | It offers both technical and account manager support. |
If you wish to build a highly-functional, and feature-pact eCommerce store, Magento Commerce will be a wise choice for you. With a Magento Commerce, you can access a wide range of powerful, built-in features and get round the clock support from Magento’s technical team.
Conversely, suppose you rely on the Opensource version instead of Magento Commerce. In that case, you will face several trade-offs, such as lack of Magento-support and native capabilities including page builder, Magento-certified cloud infrastructure, database scalability, etc.
Magento Commerce though seems a costly option, but it is worth every penny for any eCommerce business or developer.
Pros and Cons of Magento as an eCommerce Platform
When choosing an eCommerce platform, you must know its benefits and downsides. Here are a few pros and cons of Magento as an eCommerce platform that you must be aware of.
Pros
- Flexibility
Magento offers you a high level of flexibility to sell whatever you want, be it jewellery, electronics, medicines, apparel, or furniture. The Magento platform can be tailored to meet your particular eCommerce needs and establish a stunning online store. It offers API for different third-party integrations such as inventory management, CRM and much more. You can also customize the templates and achieve your desired functionality for the online store.
- Scalability
Behind every small business, there is a vision to expand in future. And when it is an eCommerce business, there should be a platform that supports this vision. It must be able to handle your increased eCommerce operations, products, and sales. Magento is highly scalable and can handle up to thousands of transactions and five hundred thousands of products in an hour. It ensures seamless functionality and growth of your eCommerce business.
- Built-in SEO Features
A high search engine ranking is of great importance to succeed with your eCommerce store. This requires you to optimize your online store with the best SEO practices. Thanks to Magento, as it offers you several built-in SEO features that help you achieve higher search engine rankings and better traffic. For instance, some Magento features let you modify and optimize certain elements of a webpage, such as meta tags and page header.
- A Big Community Support
Magento succeeds to build a large community of users and developers. It has over 8,000 certified developers, 360,000 forum members, 1,150 partners and 5,900 contributors. With such a sizable community, you can get an appropriate and quick solution to any problem with your eCommerce store. The Magento community also contributes to developing useful plugins and extensions.
- Mobile-friendly
About 80% of internet users use a Smartphone. Thus, mobile responsiveness is one of the key factors to succeed with your eCommerce store in today’s smartphone era. 84% of businesses who invested in mobile responsiveness have experienced immediate benefits and results.
Having Magento as your eCommerce platform makes things easier for you. It lets you create mobile responsive sites easily and offer a seamless experience to mobile users/customers. Magento Commerce also introduced PWA (Progressive Web Application) studio for creating eCommerce sites with simple frontend experiences on Smartphones and other mobile devices.
- Abundance of Features
Magento comes with a treasure of out-of-the-box features that makes your eCommerce store highly-functional and more user-friendly. It offers an extensive range of features, including multiple stores, multiple languages, multiple currencies, various payment options, product types, and many more. Compared to other leading platforms, Magneto stands on the top with its amazing range of features.
Cons
- Requires Expertise
Magento is a complex platform. If you are new to Magento and have no/fewer skills, it may be difficult and time-consuming to create an eCommerce store on your own. However, this can’t be a downside for you when you consider hiring a Magento expert to build your eCommerce store. Also, you can hire professionals to handle your store and ensure seamless operations.
- Expensiveness
Though the community version is free to use, for a highly-professional and functional store, you will need an enterprise version of Magento, which is quite expensive. But, the outcomes you will get with a premium enterprise version of Magento will be worth all your money.
Hosting for Magento Ecommerce
You can run Magento Commerce On-Premise on any service of your choice. It is advised to get hosting from providers who solely focus on Magento and have extensive experience with Magento hosting. A best hosting service will speed up your eCommerce website and proactively detect any problems. Conversely, a bad host may increase your costs with long-run issues.
If you look for the most reliable hosting, it is wise to choose the Magento Commerce Cloud offering where Adobe will host your website or web application by itself. You can select this option at the negotiation license stage. The cost will be added in the Magento license fee.
Magento Architecture
If you have enough understanding of technicalities, you will want to know the Magento architecture.
Magento runs on MySQL and PHP as a base. The platform uses its own PHP Framework accompanied by parts of Symfony and Zend Framework, making the code base more scalable and secure. It also utilizes Dependency Injection, Composer, and other advanced architectural principles. The default frontend of Magento runs Knockout and RequireJS, and the “PWA Studio” uses Redux and ReactJS on the frontend.
As partner technologies, Magento has offered built-in support for Elasticsearch, Redis, Varnish and RabbitMQ Message Queues.
Time to Launch Magento Ecommerce Store
The time and speed required to launch a Magento eCommerce site will depend on the project size and development requirements. Generally, a typical project takes around 6 to 12 months from the beginning of development to launch.
It is advised to plan enough time investment for discussing project design, integrations, and other requirements with your developer or Magento development agency before starting the development process.
If you are working with a Magento development agency for your eCommerce project, the timeline will vary differently depending on their way of working and other things, such as
- Only sticking with Magento’s in-built capabilities and not doing much of customization
- Going beyond Magento’s in-built capabilities for large amounts of customization and offering bespoke magento website design to each client.
- Sticking with Magento’s approach of creating an eCommerce store, together with several pre-formulated methodologies for features that layer on top of it.
Best Features of Magento Commerce
Here some most useful features of Magento that can help your eCommerce business thrive and operate smoothly.
- Third-Party Integrations
- Multilingual Features for International Businesses
- Multicurrency
- Multiregional Commerce
- Multisite eCommerce support
- Product Management
- CRM features, such as store credit, customer segments, and integration with dotdigital
- CMS Features
- Native Integrations
- Analytics
- Multichannel Features
Should You Use Magento for Your Business?
If you are a B2C, B2B business, multinational company, or a fast-moving enterprise, with long term digital commerce goals, Magento Commerce would be the most profitable platform for you.
With so many advanced features, customization options and remarkable benefits, Magento proves to be a perfect eCommerce solution for businesses of all sizes (small, mid, enterprise). It allows you to expand your business operations in the eCommerce world swiftly and effectively. With Magento, you can build a personalized online store as per your specific commerce niche and customer requirements. This lets you offer an exceptional shopping experience to your customers.
To make the most out of your eCommerce business, consider choosing the latest Magento 2 Commerce Edition. This Magento version best fits for all types of businesses, especially large organizations and B2B enterprises with a wide range of products, high business complexity, high customer traffic, and worldwide presence.
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