Choosing the right eCommerce platform to build an online store always becomes a challenge for any business. With plenty of eCommerce platforms existing in the market, each providing unique functionalities and look & feel, enterprises vacillate between options.
Magento is one of the popular eCommerce platforms widely used by business organizations for its speckled and out-of-box features. More than 250,000 merchants over the globe are using Magento as their eCommerce platform. Magento eCommerce has proven to be the best eCommerce platform and there are few attractive reasons for such.
What is the Magento eCommerce Platform?
Magento eCommerce is an open-source shopping card developed using Zend Framework and MVC architecture. The platform is robustly built to handle both front-end and back-end development effectively. Magento is available in two editions – Magento Community Edition and Magento Enterprise Edition. The shopping platform is adaptable and enables developers to modify the code as per their requirements. It enables them to inculcate current methodologies and out-of-box features to make the websites fast as well as performance-oriented. It includes no cost to develop Magento website development features. In addition, the framework motivates the easy customization of shopping carts, products, brands and much more.
Reasons Why Magento is so popular?
The main feature that makes Magento eCommerce different from others is its built-in SEO features as well as support for SEO results. As this open-source is embedded with plenty of tools and technologies, your Magento developers can get your site ready quickly since it is easy to customize and integrate most of its features. As such, you can attain a rapid development with a brand-new eCommerce site or a better website if you are going for redesigning.
Only a few eCommerce platforms enable users to easily upgrade, disable, update their websites and Magento is one of them. It ensures easy site management; hence, you can easily edit, update, publish as well as handle the content of your sites. Magento also bundled with mobile-friendly features, making the web portal customization as per mobile users' needs as simple as possible.
Explore Magento or WooCommerce – Which is the Suitable eCommerce Solution?
Magento eCommerce Features
Magento offers almost everything to set up an effective eCommerce website. Where it is about catalog management, advanced search feature, payment-processing gateways, order management, you can accomplish the task here. To better understand the several benefits of Magento, you need to explore some of the many great eCommerce features, which Magento offers.
1. Catalog Management
ECommerce merchants don’t need to afford to waive product catalog management. The idea of catalog management seems simple enough, but it’s quite hard for several merchants – for various reasons. You need to maintain a single catalog for all of your products, and it should promote sales. Presenting your products with Magento eCommerce is very authoritative. You can catalog as well as control it with ease. There are several options within this feature:
- Batch Import & Export of catalog
- Digital products downloads like videos, music, etc
- Complete inventory management
- Approve, Edit & Delete Product Tag
- RSS Feeds and much more
You can post more than one image per product, enable wish list options and provide descriptions & reviews. Besides, the catalog can provide easy browsing, filters for search and product comparisons. You can easily add products to the catalog, make updates or modifications, and set options like shipping, orders and payment ways as per your customer preference.
2. Order Management
Order Management is a vital process that enables online stores to run efficiently & keeps customers happy, making them come back in the future. Order management in Magento bridges the in-store and online gap and drives smooth customer experience. It ensures convenient, flexible and cost-effective delivery. The order fulfillment system offers processes for shipping, order organization, refunds and order status. It includes everything an eCommerce business needs to boost revenue via an order fulfillment operation. The most important options in this feature are:
- Creating, viewing, editing, and fulfilling orders from admin panel
- Support to print invoices, shipping labels, and packing slips
- Email notifications
- Options to create one or more invoices, credit memos, and shipments per orders
You can fulfill the orders from anywhere with a PoS, PC or tablet. Offer an endless aisle of products to your customers. You can process orders in bulk with just one click. It also handles predefined exceptions and sends an email notification when something goes a miss. As it has been organized, it makes it simpler to handle orders as well as analyze the results of the orders afterward.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Setting up an eCommerce website is just an initial step to making consistent sales in an online store. There are several strategies to bring traffic to the site, but the best long-term strategy by far is with SEO. Without search engine optimization, nobody can find the products they want to buy on the internet and your store can’t find its customers.
Magento eCommerce platform is an SEO friendly platform. It supports your eCommerce site to be ranked as the best website via white-hat SEO campaigns. Descriptions, Meta tags, and keywords can be configured effortlessly for every product and making your team control over how Google, Yahoo, and other search engines interprets your shop product offering. The set of options it offers to make your online store SEO optimized are:
- Generate Google sitemaps
- Search engine friendly URLs
- Sort popular searches automatically
- Automatically generates popular search terms
4. Advertising and Marketing
Marketing and advertising are crucial for your eCommerce store. A successful online store needs occasional marketing campaigns and online promotions to make visitors purchase and coming back in the future. With Magento, you are provided with the option to use a wide range of marketing tools for your eCommerce business. It allows you to handle and sort out coupon codes, promotions, etc. For better customer behavior, it is vital to have a good themed site and it can be modified, as you like. Magento includes several sources to offer themes and designs and most of them are free to use.
It includes numerous tools to make promotion easier and few of them are:
- Cross-sell products
- Monitor coupon usage
- Mange newsletters & polls
- Supports price variations based on groups and quantity
- URL tools, new promotion tools and more
5. Internationalization
Website internalization is the common approach for SMEs looking to boost their international sales and marketing. It is relatively simple but makes a huge difference in finding as well as transacting with partners and customers overseas. Magento offers a chance to go beyond your country boundaries and among diverse cultures with its support on currencies and languages in different parts of the world.
Magento offers you a global platform to flourish. It enables your store to be presented in different versions based on the currencies and language of localization. It helps to attract new customers with its multi-store functionality. You can run several channels or stores from a single Magento eCommerce installation. It can translate an interface to over 60 different languages with support for different payment methods and tax rates.
International support key options are:
- Tax rate support
- Multilingual
- Localization
- Support for multiple currencies
6. Easy Checkout
You are not limited to a single checkout option – Magento eCommerce includes easy checkout options. Checkout possesses a significant influence on eCommerce sales and a lengthy or glitched process can lead to abandoned carts. Keeping the checkout process simple increases the possibility of achieving a successful purchase.
With Magento, you can allow your customers to purchase multiple products simultaneously and progress to checkout quickly. Customers no need to pay separately for each product purchase during checkout. In addition, you don’t need to install numerous extensions to ensure a quick checkout process. Its one-step checkout feature makes the shopping experience even better.
Checkout options offered:
- Shipping products to multiple addresses in a single order
- SSL security support for the purchase
- Address book support for checkout
- Options for gift message per item
- Saved shopping carts and options to set an expiration time
7. Payment Modes
Payment is the biggest concern for merchants when picking the eCommerce shopping platform. Being paid is the main aim of online store selling products & subscriptions. Magento eCommerce incorporates a plethora of payment alternatives. Your customers are provided with the options to choose from the various payment methods as different regions have different popular payment systems. When your customer places an order on the Magento eCommerce store, it will provide him both immediate (PayPal, credit card, etc) or delayed (check, COD, credit, money order) payment options. Whatever payment methods your customers choose, Magento offers convenience to them while meeting their payment expectations and reduces your risk of not being paid.
Alternative payment options:
- One-page checkout
- Integration with Authroized.Net and PayPal
- Accept Purchase Orders
- Accept Check orders
- Additional Payment add-ons
8. Analytics &Reporting
Time and burn rates are important factors for any business to success. If you are not tracking, which marketing activities are working and which are not, you are wasting both money and time. Keeping reports on all areas of online sales and marketing activities offers you several benefits over competitors who don’t possess this statistical information.
Magento comes with an inbuilt analytics and reporting suite that displays the performance of your online store. As it can monitor consumer trends, it empowers you to define strategies as well as work accordingly. You can also integrate with Google Analytics. Magento dashboard provides an overview of the site and customer behavior. The report that Magento eCommerce offers to the user generally focuses on:
- Tax
- Sales
- Best Purchased Products
- Best Viewed Products
- Total Sales refunded
- Low Stock of Products
- Total Sales Invoiced
9. Enhanced Security
ECommerce security is crucial for businesses and a basic theory that runs through every business is trust. All these features of Magento eCommerce are geared towards creating and increasing customer’s trust. To reduce the chance of security attacks and prevent password hacking, the eCommerce platform has added two-factor authentication and Google ReCaptcha. These features ensure security to certain eCommerce pages like Register, Login, Contact Form, Admin Login and Forgot Password.
More Magento eCommerce out-of-box features are:
- GraphQL Support
- Page Builder
- PWA (Progressive Web App ) Studio
- Asynchronous and Bulk Web API
- Multi-Source Inventory (MSI)
- PHP 7.2 Support
- Page Hierarchy
- Google Tag Manager
- Rewards & Loyalty
- Customizable Pricing
Read this Case study to learn how the above features of Magento helped reinvent the online fashion space
Be it the order management features or the expanded ways of marketing your online store, Magento is the best one-stop solution for your eCommerce business. To start using this open-source platform, all you need is web hosting and you can hire Magento developers if you don’t have any experience with this software.
