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In the past few years, many plug and play e-commerce platforms have emerged like Shopify, BigCommerce and more, to possibly cater to every type of e-commerce store being built. Yet, Magento is still a favourite and more than 1/4th of the e-commerce stores run on Magento.
Let’s go over some of the top reason why it continues to be favourite of developers as well as store owners.
1. Tailored E-Commerce Solution
Magento started as a platform specifically for e-commerce, unlike others in the space. It has many of its core features so suited for e-commerce that building an e-commerce website becomes easy with Magento. Some of its key features include: Dashboards and Reports, Customer Segmentation, Inventory Management, Supplier Management, Product Bundling, Cross-Sell & Up-Sell Management, Catalogues and Newsletters etc.
2. Versions to suit your needs
Magento is Open Source, which means its free and it has 3 versions-
• Community Edition, which is free and the most popular of all
• Enterprise Edition is paid and has higher security standards
• Magento Go is paid and hosted on Magento’s servers
3. Magento Connect
Magento source code can be easily tweaked to suit the requirements of the website, which makes it a favourite of developers. In addition to this, it offers Magento Connect Marketplace, where various extensions can be easily installed. It is the world’s largest e-commerce app marketplace and Magento really boasts of it.
4. Large Community
Magento platform gets updated regularly and all the issues or flaws spotted are usually corrected quickly. It has a very big developer community and that makes troubleshooting easy. The large knowledge base available for the platform gives it a competitive edge and makes it very reliable.
5. Hosting of your choice
Magento allows you to choose the kind of hosting service as per your convenience. Magento Go is a hosted platform and with other versions of Magento, you can pick the hosting service of your choice. This way the costs remain low and you can even switch the hosting service if you are unsatisfied or face any issues.
6. Extremely Scalable
Magento allows you to grow your business as much. There is no limitation to the number of products or SKUs that can be uploaded, with absolutely no extra cost. This is not the case with other platforms, where you pay a hefty amount to the platform provider as you grow big. So, with Magento go ahead and grow as much at no additional expense.
7. Integration Options
With many e-commerce platforms, integration of third-party apps is limited and sometimes there is a cost involved. With Magento’s extensible API, you can connect any kind of app or plugin- payment gateways, web analytics, shipping, tracking etc.
8. Modular And Customizable
The complexity of an E-Commerce business depends on its size as well as the industry it operates in. What would be good for a fashion retailer may not stand true for a hardware retailer? Similarly, size and scale of operations, customer service needs etc. pose different challenges for the retailer.
Hence, a customizable platform is the right choice for any e-commerce player. Being an open-source e-commerce platform, Magento is highly customizable and modular. This allows a retailer to create an amazing customer experience, by modifying everything from page layouts, templates, workflows, grids, etc.
9. Faster Loading and Processing
A survey suggests that 47% of web users want the site to lead in less than 2 seconds. Anything more than that is considered slow and bounces are really high. These statistics have a higher implication on e-commerce, because every person that leaves without making the buying decision, impacts the conversion rate and the revenue. There is no compromise when it comes to speed of the website. With Magento, you can cache your pages easily using Varnish, retrieve data from databases in milliseconds, the process queries faster and load pages in no time.
10. SEO Friendly
Making the website SEO optimized is a big challenge for an e-commerce site, as their pages run into hundreds or thousands. The competition for a particular keyword could be really high, which can make or break the deal. Magento offloads a lot of work related to SEO, by creating SEO optimized URLs, meta tags, descriptions, URL rewrites, site maps, navigation and structures and more. All of these features are in-built, which saves a lot of time and effort.
11. Mobile Friendly
Mobile phone penetration is extremely high in current consumer base and it is become one of the popular channels for them make purchase decisions. More than 67% of US consumers own smartphone and spend a lot of time surfing web on phones than laptops or computers. It is mandatory for an e-commerce website to be mobile optimized. With Magento’s HTML5 capabilities, it becomes really simple. Magento gives your mobile website AV and drag-drop capabilities, image scaling for different screen sizes etc.
12. One Backend, Multiple Websites
Most e-commerce platforms allow you to only have one store for one system. But Magento allows you to run multiple websites on one single backend. It also allows each of these websites to be of different layout and design. This can be great for e-commerce sites that operate in many niche categories.
13. Multi-Lingual and Multi-Currency Support
Magento platform supports multiple currencies and tax systems. It also supports website customization in local languages and local cookie notification policies. You can also align the text from right to left depending on the language. This is great for e-commerce websites that have growing number of visitors in Asia, Australia and other parts of the world. Now business can be easily scaled across geographies, without any platform constraints.
14. Business Intelligence
Magento has an in-built analytical and tracking tool called Magento’s Business Intelligence. This tool is a complete analytics platform, which consolidates all the data from databases, extensions and other third-party tools. This tool delivers data-driven insights to businesses, which are critical for businesses to grow.
15. Easy Maintenance, Low Cost
Magento Store can be easily maintained with a minimum number of employees, because everything in Magento is ready-made. Magento platform is very structured and hence it becomes seamless. With Magento CMS, e-commerce can be developed with low cost. More customizations will obviously need more time and resources, yet Magento is the best platform to build your e-commerce.
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