With over a quarter of all ecommerce sites running on Magento, it’s hard to ignore how successful this platform is for online businesses. It’s not just the little guys either; a lot of the biggest brands out there use Magento, such as Magento… the list goes on and on.
But why is it so popular, given that there are so many different platforms to choose from? The quick answer is that it’s because Magento is the most specialised yet versatile platform for eCommerce websites. The long answer is a laundry list of different reasons it out performs other ecommerce platforms.
There is a lot of web-development knowledge in this article, so it has been written with the help of Peacock Carter, a specialist web-design agency based in the North East of England. This article will outline several reasons why Magento is the best platform for ecommerce and why you should think about switching, if you haven’t already.
Magento was designed specifically for ecommerce
Other popular platforms, such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc., were designed to serve as easy-to-use content management systems, and they do offer ecommerce functionality, but these are only available as plugins. Magento, on the other hand, was designed right from the start to function as the ideal platform for online stores. This means that Magento has the full range of ecommerce-ready features, such as:
– Inventory management
– User dashboards
– Sophisticated shipping and/or supplier management
– It allows products to be bundled
– Customer segmentation is enabled
– There are up-selling and cross-selling features built in that help you engage further with customers
– There is a CMS feature for company blogs, news, product guides, etc.
Magento is an open-source platform
Although you can opt for a paid Magento package, as well as one where you pay for the platform and for it to be hosted on Magento’s servers, the Magento Community Edition is totally free and can be downloaded and installed for absolutely nothing! As Magento is open source, web developers around the world have access to its code. This means that there are lots of highly trained professionals constantly innovating extensions for it. This means that there is an almost everlasting supply of additional functions should you decide your website needs to be customised a little further.
So, while it’s Magento’s pre-set ecommerce capabilities that first attract businesses, it’s Magento’s customisability that allows businesses to change their website to suit their ever-changing needs. If you’d like to browse a range of different Magento extensions, then check out the Magento Connect Marketplace.
Magento is very secure
Because Magento has such a large developer community working on it, there are very regular security updates for it. With so many experts constantly working on it, any chinks in its armour are usually noticed very quickly and rectified. This kind of security is very reassuring if your entire business functions online. Of course, if you need further reassurance, you can also pay extra for the Enterprise Edition of Magento, as it comes with Secure Payment Bridge.
With Magento, you aren’t punished for expanding as a business
Many other top ecommerce platforms add on costs as you add new features to your website. This sometimes feels as though you’re being penalised for growing as a business or charged for being proactive about improving your website. But because Magento is open source, you can add on as many features as you like without paying anything extra.
The same goes for the number of products or category pages you have: as your online store grows, your product range will grow. With most other ecommerce platforms, you have to pay exponential fees to add more product lines. With Magento, however, it is absolutely free to add new product lines. With Magento, you can grow as much as you like and it won’t try to make you pay for your progress.
Magento is very SEO Friendly
It’s impossible to ignore SEO if you run an online business. And you shouldn’t ignore it, as there are over 100 billion searches on Google each month, with an average of 2.3 million Google searches per second (source). This is how the majority of people shop online and putting time and money into SEO is the only way to compete in your industry. So, given that Magento is built to be as friendly to SEO principles as possible, this is definitely another reason to consider swapping over to Magento. Magento has built-in SEO features that make it easy for you to optimise your URLs, descriptions, site maps, category pages, and so much more.
Because Magento is designed to make optimisation as easy as possible, it will save you a lot of time and money optimising your website for search. However, as with any platform, Magento isn’t perfect for SEO, as there can be some problems with duplicate content created by parameter URLs, for example. But whilst Magento isn’t perfect for SEO, it provides a good, solid foundation which an experienced Magento developer should be able to advise you on.
Magento makes it easy to optimise your site for mobile
As more and more people are using their smart phones to shop online, its vital that all ecommerce sites are optimised for mobile. If your website does not offer a good mobile experience, your customers will just go to one of your competitors instead. Luckily, Magento’s HTML5 functionality means that it is easy to customise your website so that it provides a streamlined, scaled down experience for mobile users.
Magento is the perfect international platform
If your business operates across different countries and different currencies, then you need an ecommerce system that allows customers to pay with their own currency. Magento has been made with an in-built multiple-currency system that even allows for different tax rates. This system also makes it very easy for you to include various languages. All of this make it easier to maximise your website’s ability to tap into an international customer base.
That’s all we have time for in this article. We hope you’ve learned a lot more about Magento and that it convinces a few readers who’ve been sitting on the fence to finally change platforms. There are many reasons why Magento is the best ecommerce platform and it is worth the added effort and expense in the short term to make the transition.