The ever-evolving world of eCommerce is now a multi trillion-dollar industry, with numerous eCommerce websites available worldwide. The outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital transformation and led to a surge in eCommerce, even amid the economic slowdown. Many retail businesses shifted their mode of operations from a brick and mortar establishment to online, entirely. At the same time, purchase behaviour has also changed with the given circumstances. It has therefore become imperative to walk hand in hand with the advancement. According to customers’ shopping habits, experts have predicted that by 2040, almost 95% of purchases will be made online. A report generated in 2021 determining the growth of the eCommerce markets showed that the eCommerce industry is led by China with a whopping $672 billion followed by the US with $340 billion.
As a business owner who is hoping to expand the business to the online platform, it is fundamental to choose an efficient and convenient eCommerce platform to host your online store. Amongst the numerous platforms available, the preferred option for many small businesses to business giants is a website that runs on Magento (Adobe Commerce Cloud). Some of the big brands such as Samsung, Nike, and Coca Cola use Magento for their online retail store, particularly because of the two prominent features offered by Magento – shopping cart and catalogue-management tools. These tools not only give the brands full control over their online store but also help manage the content. Global data states that over 25000 online businesses use Magento, accounting for about 1.2% of all websites available. Magento lets you build an eCommerce website that would reflect both your brand and product perfectly.
Let us start by digging a bit into the basic features of Magento before chalking out the reasons that make Magento so popular.
Magento: An Overview
Founded by Varien Inc., Magento is an open-source platform written in Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) that helps to create eCommerce websites. Built on the Zend framework, Magento was released on March 31, 2008, but acquired by Adobe Inc. in May 2018 for $1.68 billion. In 2016, a new and improved version of Magento called Magento 2 was released; after that, both versions of Magento have existed simultaneously, catering to all three levels of businesses- small, medium, and large. The use of Magento benefited business owners who run both online and offline stores with evolving eCommerce and Omnichannel retail.
Magento offers two different platforms-
- Magento Open Source also known as Magento Community Edition,
- Adobe Commerce previously known as Magento Enterprise Edition,
And two different partners-
- Solution Partners- These are the development agencies having expertise in eCommerce delivery for Magento commerce businesses and can assist in implementing, maintaining, and upgrading Magento eCommerce websites.
- Technology Partners- These companies provide out of the box solutions to businesses for improving their websites. They offer products and services in multiple categories such as marketing automation, payments, content management, shipping, tax, hosting, and performance.
Features of Magento
- Reporting and Analytics: An essential factor of an eCommerce website is its precision in analysing and generating reports. For enhanced analysis, Magento offers Google Analytics support and provides you various reports on- sales, tax, abandoned shopping cart, most-viewed products, most-purchased products, low stock, search terms, product reviews, use of coupons, total sales invoices.
- Product Browsing: Imagine browsing through a website that is neither appealing nor user-friendly, from a customer’s point of view. Would you continue browsing and purchasing from that website? The answer is No! Here is where Magento offers exclusive functionalities wherein the users can enjoy an enhanced shopping experience. Some of the features are- zoom-in and zoom-out, multiple images for a single product, stock availability display, wish-listing products, and more.
- Catalogue Management: Irrespective of the products you’re selling, you need to ensure that your product catalogue is up to date. Magento offers multiple features that help with catalogue management and supports displaying virtual products, limitless product attributes, editing and deleting product reviews, full-inventory management, expediting product creation, dynamic pricing and social sharing of products.
- Customer Accounts: Aside from the multiple functionalities offered by Magento, it comes with an easy to manage user account. Its features include a comprehensive account dashboard, order history and status, more than one ‘shipping and billing’ addresses, viewing recently ordered products, newsletter subscription and others.
- Order Management: The process of order management is made easy and convenient with Magento. Businesses can enjoy other services such as order viewing, creating and editing from the admin panel, printing multiple invoices, call-centre support, shipping labels, email notifications, RSS feed for new orders, and order status and credit memos. Note that some of these tasks are possible using third-party extensions and services.
- Payment and Shipping: Secure and convenient payment and shipping are the crucial features of any eCommerce website. With Magento, you can run and operate both functions conveniently. Different types of functions such as same page checkout, complete SSL security, payment gateway integration, shipping module integration, support for multiple payment channels, etc., are incorporated in the Magento platform.
- Search Engine Optimisation: Magento provides a wide range of SEO services that include generating GOOGLE sitemaps, SEO friendly URLs, sorting popular searches, Compatibility with different search engines, widely used search terms, and others.
- Marketing and Promotional Tools: Magento has effective marketing and promotional tools that are beneficial for marketing and advertising your business. These tools help provide services like product up-selling and cross-selling, pricing based on promotions, reports on coupon code sharing, monitoring the use of coupons, promotion of new products, free shipping, and more.
- Site Management: This is one of the most important features offered by Magento. The content management system (CMS) of Magento is the best solution to build fast-loading and engaging landing pages. Some of the other key features of Magento are tax calculations, multiple languages and currency support, user authentication, customisable designs that augment the process of managing the website.
- Mobile eCommerce: Evidently, most customers prefer using their smartphones or mobile electronic devices such as tablets or iPads to make an online purchase. About 60% of customers shopping online do so using their mobile phones. Magento lets you cater to this extensive demography of mobile phone users. Magento comes with HTML5 technology that helps you create a mobile-friendly storefront. Therefore, users can conveniently develop mobile-friendly websites and applications using Magento. It also supports other functions such as drag and drop, zooming, multi-touch option, and many more that offers better mobile experiences.
RELATED POST: Magento for B2B and B2C eCommerce Platforms
Advantages of Magento
Although the features listed above give an idea of the benefits offered by Magento, we have jotted down a few key pointers for reference. Magento offers:
- Improved scalability and performance
- An enhanced shopping experience to the users
- A sturdy platform for your eCommerce website
- Mobile-friendliness
- SEO features
- Customisable security features
- An integrated marketplace and third-party integrations
- Choosing a hosting service as per your preference
- Enhanced Speed
- An extensive professional community
What makes Magento so popular?
Now that we have an idea about the concept of Magento, let us discuss what makes Magento so popular for all the eCommerce websites. Primarily, seven key factors make Magento popular.
- Affordable Website Development for eCommerce: The first and the most crucial factor to be considered while deciding on the eCommerce platform to build your online store is affordability. Even though large scale businesses can afford to spend a handsome amount on website building, it doesn’t make much sense to waste resources when you can get excellent results at an affordable budget. Because of Magento’s cloud hosting services, website development for eCommerce has become less expensive, making it easier to monitor and host multiple websites at low operational costs. At the same time, you can be tension-free about data loss or scalability. Since everything is available on the cloud, data backup will be done at frequent intervals, making it easier to expand your online store.
- Easy Third-party Integration: Integration is an essential component for the smooth functioning of a successful online business. You can easily perform tasks like taking sale orders, receiving payments, and making deliveries automatically. With Magento, you can integrate third-party services with ease. If you wish to focus on providing your customers with an exclusive user experience, you would want to look into customer feedback and complaints to ensure that you give them personalised service. Comprehensive integration is convenient with Magento, letting you save a lot of time trying to find a compatible tool for website integration. With Magento, you can integrate payment gateways and give order tracking access to your customers as well. Google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Checkout will let you check the website performance so that you can determine your website’s productivity.
- A Modernised Open-source Platform: Since Magento Open Source is an open-source platform; merchants do not have to pay a license fee. Therefore, you can choose a professional website developer to build and promote your website. You can even customise your website as per your preferences by asking your website developer to add new functionalities to improve the performance of your website.
- Variety of Payment Gateways: The primary goal of every business is to make a profit. When it comes to online business, it is important to consider the mode of receiving payments for the products and services you’re selling. For this, you need to incorporate a robust payment method to fetch better results. Since Magento supports most of the widely used payment gateways such as Amazon Pay, Google Checkout, PayPal, Cash on Delivery, etc., and your customers can easily pay for the purchased products.
- SEO Services: Since Magento is SEO friendly, you can stop worrying about optimising your website to rank better on the search engine result page. Sitemaps, URL structure, positioning layer, descriptions, etc., are some of the functionalities that make your website crawlable by the search engine robots.
READ MORE: The Ultimate Guide to Magento SEO
- Mobile-friendly Optimisation: Smartphones and other electronic portable devices have become more accessible to the masses. Maximum numbers of online purchases are made using mobile devices. It is therefore mandatory to ensure that your online store is smartphone compatible. Since Magento is compatible with HTML5, it gives the customers a better shopping experience. You can easily adjust the size of the image without waiting for a long loading time. Magento offers a smooth transition from a desktop to a mobile device, providing the customers with a seamless shopping experience.
- High-end Performance: The best feature that gives Magento exclusivity is its capacity to reduce page loading time. Customers enjoy a shorter waiting time with its high-speed query processing and other static operations. Reports show that about 53% of customers abandon a website that takes beyond three seconds to load. Here is where Magento proves to be a blessing for online businesses. At the same time, Magento provides the facility to customise your website as per your taste and preferences which would help in highlighting your brand further.
Summing Up
Magento resolves many challenges otherwise faced by the eCommerce industry such as
- A lack of business process integration
- Demand for multiple payment gateways
- Website optimisation challenge
The exclusive and distinctive features of Magento make it stand out from its competitors. Equipped with state-of-the-art tools and functions for both the business owners and customers, Magento is known to create the most convenient and user-friendly eCommerce platform. Our certified Magento professionals at 18th DigiTech focus on creating eCommerce sites that are not only Magento-powered but are also future-ready. At the same time, the sites are personalised to suit your brand. Known to develop, test, deliver, and manage end-to-end customer solutions, we help in making your online business a top-notch one. Contact us for more information!
