Why use Magento for eCommerce?

What is Magento?

For anyone who is familiar with eCommerce, they are sure to have heard this name at least once. Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform. It was acquired by Adobe for $1.68 billion back in 2018. It has developed a lot since then. It was built upon the PHP programming language. Magento utilizes other PHP frameworks as well. Such as Symfony and Laminas.

The platform was developed based on open source technology. What this means is that it is free to use, study, change, and distribute but its license is held by a company that holds the ownership rights. Magento has over 250,000 active stores on the internet. The platform offers multiple features to online retail store owners such as marketing tools, search engines, catalog management, product management, customer service, inventory management, payment processing, and data analytics.

Users can also add their own features by using Magento integration services after store owners hire Magento developers. This way store owners can modify the store to suit their needs. Magento also allows store owners to manipulate the theme of the store, their functionalities, the content displayed, the data, and almost everything. This is flexibility is a reason why Magento has over 500,000 users who use Magento for eCommerce, whether it be purchasing or selling. Magento allows store owners to scale their stores without any need to migrate to other platforms.

Expanding stores always want to use Magento as the platform caters very well to high amounts of traffic. You can use a Magento Web development company to set up or improve the performance of your store. Magento has alternates such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, and WooCommerce but Magento has superior robustness, flexibility, usability, and learnability.

You can hire a Magento web development company to handle the store development while you focus on the products because a good product needs to be complemented by an adequate store to make sure that the business grows consistently.

Why use Magento?

Magento should be used for e-commerce. Magento is a highly-customizable platform. It can help Magento store owners make stores that are able to meet their business requirements. Magento is easy to use and it can be easily managed by the store owner themselves. The platform compatibility means that new extensions and applications can always be integrated with the store.

The platform also has over 250,000 websites and a forum of over 360,000 members. The platform is even used by international companies such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Fox Connect, Olympus, and Warby Parker. Unlike other e-commerce platforms, you can stay and grow on the Magento platform safely without having to worry about any external factor.

This is because Magento is highly scalable and supports the growth of stores from their start to an unending journey. Magento also has frequent updates that continue to improve the platform.

What are the features of Magento?

Magento provides features that set the trends for other e-commerce stores. This feature-rich platform offers solutions to Magento merchants with complete autonomy to control the functionality and make the stores’ operation flexible and has the ability to create stores that provide an unrivaled customer shopping experience. You can tailor these features to suit the business requirements of your strategy. There is extensive support available as well.

Marketing, promotional, and conversion tools.

The Magento store provides its merchant with the tools required for a successful marketing strategy.  Magento provides a tool that allows store owners to cross-sell and up-sell their products. The store owners can also run discount coupons to either attract buyers or retain the previous ones. These coupons can be modified for certain groups, expiry dates can be set up, and can be applied to only selective products.

These coupons can then be exported to the customers and distributed via email, newsletters, and any custom schemes. This keeps the store active and runs a successful marketing strategy. Furthermore, Magento also provides tools to monitor the success rate and produces detailed reports for the coupons and marketing strategy. Magento also provides a multi-tier pricing option for giving users a quantity discount.

This way customers can purchase a big quantity of products at rates that cut the buyer’s cost. The platforms also offer the customer to be grouped as per their behaviors. Store owners can also set up product bundles to increase the perceived value of the products and also reduce their inventory stock. Magento also offers a shopping cart that is persistent on the page, this means the items in the carts remain there for review at any instant.

The platform also gives newsletter management for stores to update their customer about the products and any other information to support the marketing of your products.

Search Engine Optimization.

Search engine optimization is a must to have on e-commerce stores.  The SEO of Magento allows takes user satisfaction to unprecedented levels. The SEO makes searching for the customer easy as the optimization allows customers to find items that are relevant to them by using data science and help customers find products that they couldn’t quite remember and entered incorrectly in the search bar.

The Magento platform is 100% search engine friendly. Search engines such as Elasticsearch are already integrated and others can be integrated into your store by using expert Magento Integration services by a licensed Magento Web development company. Magento makes use of the Google Site map to have search-engine friendly URLs. The URL rewriting gives control of the URL’s Meta-information for the products to enhance usability.

The platform uses popular search terms to redirect users to your stores after you use them in the product description. The platform also utilizes Google Content API for enhancing the experience of the user.

Site management.

The Magento site is highly manageable. Store owners can manage their websites independently. The owner can control multiple Magento stores from one to a single administration panel. This makes managing effective. Store owners can also provide permissions for different system roles and users for managers, developers, and assistants.

The stores are also highly customizable. The layout can be designed using custom or existing templates. It has batch import and export for data to make a transfer between platforms easy and quick. The platform has web service APIs that allow effortless integration between Magento and third-party applications.

Magento has a content management page where blogs can be published, these can be informational to attract audiences. To manage the security, the platform has a CAPTCHA functionality to make sure that automatic scripts do not attempt fake logins and use up storage resources. This function can be enabled on customer and admin login areas to make sure that the login is being attempted by a human.

The Magento platform also manages the support for users of different locations. It has multiple currencies and language support. Tax rates can also be set per location, product category, or customer group as there are different rates for wholesalers and retailers.

Catalog Management and browsing.

The Magento Catalog management is a core feature of the platform. It provides a simple, and configurable catalog that can be for grouped or bundled products. The catalog allows store owners to set a different price for retailers, wholesalers, and customers. The store owners can set advanced pricing rules and provide support for special pricing strategies.

Magento also provides virtual products that can be downloaded as samples. These digital products help in customer experience the product. You can also add unlimited product attributes. Customers can also set the attributes to make product creation quick and effortless. The images of products can also be resized for being in the appropriate format.

The inventory can be maintained by enabling back-ordering thanks to the RSS activation on the back-end. This means when a price reaches a minimum, a request for re-ordering is sent to the suppliers. Store owners can update their products in batches to save time and resources. The catalog can also provide customer sorting, this provides a sort filter based on price or brand for advanced results.

The catalog browsing enables faceted navigation on the store by using product filtering for categories and results. The static block tool is available that creates categories for landing pages on Magento. The provision of product comparison with history helps users make decisions for purchase. The catalog also shows popular search terms and recently reviewed products to give the owner an idea of the market behavior.

The catalog can also provide shipping integration with the labels that can be viewed, edited, and printed. Shipping provider rates can also be integrated with the products.

Product browsing.

The product browsing allows customers to be offered extensive and all available attributes to the customer so that no question in their mind is left unanswered. The storefront provides multiple images per product to help the customer view the product. Zoom in and zoom out capabilities allow for increased focus.

The page can also show the stock availability on the page. Related products can also be recommended to increase upselling. The product can have reviews on them so that the customer feedback is available for other customers as well. Products can be shared on social media and even be linked to others via email.

Checkout, payment processing, and shipping services.

Magento facilitates the closing of deals by providing a one-page checkout. To store the details, address books are used to make checkout effortless on the customer end by storing the credit card details. This action is made secure as Magento provides SSL security support for order payments. Integration with multiple payment gateways is also possible.

The payment can also be made via cash on delivery and cheque as per the customer’s convenience. Payment in installations is also available for customers via Magento Connect. The tax and shipping charges are also made transparently visible on the checkout page. The platform also provides shipping to multiple addresses as per customer convenience.

There is an option for account creation at the beginning of checkout to make sure that the customer is registered and the deal is safely closed. Customized order status is provided. This makes tracking orders easy and the updates from the store allow customers to be provided with feedback on their status.

Order processing workflows are defined as per the order status such as new, processing, payment, review, complete. Customers can also be kept informed by sending email notifications of orders.

Order Management.

This feature enables the store owners to edit, preview, create and fulfill orders easily from their admin panel. They can also create one or multiple invoices, shipments of the product, and credit card memos for every order which can allow for split fulfillment as per the order details. The store can print packaging slips, shipping labels, and invoices.

Call center order creation

To manage customers, a call center order creation option is provided for customers. The products can be booked via call. The order status and customer support can also be provided to the clients on call to provide substitutivity on the store.

Also, product customizations and configurations can all be done on the call. Then the customer details can be used to make a new customer account so that their history is recorded for future use.

Customer Accounts.

The Magento platform provides a feature to create customer accounts to keep the data manageable. This is achieved by creating account dashboards so customer data can be stored for future use. Store owners can view the customer’s order status, their re-orders, and their most recently ordered items. The customer’s billing and shipping addresses can also be viewed.

Their submitted product reviews, product tags, can also be viewed. The total customer refunds can also be viewed. They can be sent newsletters once they subscribe by their emails. As per customer instructions, an order can easily be modified as well. Customer order status can also be tracked via their account.

Assisted shopping.

The customer service personnel can manage the products and coupons that are available in the customer’s cart to help them be provided the best service through the administrator panel. This assists in a successful checkout.