Magento is an open-source E-Commerce platform that helps individuals and businesses to create highly robust, customized, and flexible websites. Magento is owned by Adobe (acquired in 2018) and is part of a vast eCommerce ecosystem. It is free to use and is backed up by a strong and updated community. According to a leading migration company, Litextension, Magento was one of the top 3 most popular eCommerce platforms migrated to in 2020, just behind WooCommerce and Shopify.

Magento 2 is the latest version of Magento available in the market. It was created from the ground up based on the feedback of developers, clients, and end-users. In fact, Magento 2 is the most significant update that Magento has received since its inception. As compared to the previous version, Magento 1, users now have access to much greater opportunities with Magento 2:

• Robust architecture with modern technologies
• Optimized website performance
• Mobile Optimization
• User-friendly admin panel
• Simplified check-out process
• Enhanced security
• Ease of integrating third-party extensions      

A positive Edge to using Magento for Ecommerce Development is that it’s totally free of cost and you can develop a long-term Ecommerce Site for your Business and for individuals. You can build your store because Magento is one of the best open-source eCommerce platforms.

Perhaps the most significant Characteristic of Magento is how businesses of all sorts and sizes can leverage the platform according to their requirements. It is highly scalable and lets users customize their websites with ease. Let’s dive deeper and see what the powerful e-commerce tool has to offer.

There are Some Basic Features that Magento Offers:

Order Management

Incorporates everything from the start of purchase to delivery of goods to the customer. It is a crucial stage where processes must be streamlined for closing the order without unnecessary delays and problems.

Magento’s order management tools allow you to:

• Create, edit, view, and manage orders
• Order fulfillment features, invoice creation, and facility of return (credit memos).
• Facilitate your customers with phone orders. Here, customer representatives can create orders for the client using the admin panel.
• Create and remove customers and have access to view and manage their shopping carts and coupons with complete transparency.

Analytics and Reporting

To effectively manage your online business, accurate analytics and reporting features are required. With analytics and reporting, you can get a clear image of your business position.

With Magento, you can:

• View important statistics on your customized dashboard like sales revenue and inventory.
• easily integrate your website with Google Analytics, where you can monitor your website users, trends, regions of traffic, and other important statistics.
• Create customized reports for your business like sales reports, tax reports, inventory reports, abandoned cart reports, and others for enhanced business performance.      

Catalog Management

Having interactive and updated catalogs on your e-commerce store is of utmost importance. To help you with catalog management, Magento offers a variety of functions that allow you to create and configure catalogs with individual and grouped products. You can:

• Add multiple pictures with responsive image sizes
• Set multiple attributes, add product tags and reviews
• Set special prices for customers and wholesalers

There are other catalog management features as well like search engine result rewriting, personalized product views, and customer-specific sorting.

Search Engine Optimization

According to a report by Business Insider, 39% of all eCommerce traffic was directed from search engines. This number has risen since then, and it is evident that for any online business to flourish, SEO holds paramount importance. Luckily, Magento is an SEO-friendly platform. It allows you to:

• Easily create and submit Google Sitemaps
• Make your website easily crawlable and make indexing easier.
• Gain greater control over managing URLs for your website
• Configure meta descriptions, tags, and keywords for higher rankings

Checkout and Payment

Having a smooth checkout and payment procedure is vital for any online marketplace. Let’s be honest, what’s the purpose of all the hard work when you can’t convert any of it to revenue? What if your customer can’t charge their card? Or do items keep on getting misplaced from their cart?

Magento has a high customer engagement and order fulfillment rate. This is because the eCommerce platform is packed with a ton of checkout and payment features. It allows customers to

• Checkout from a single page
• Guest account for checkout without creating a user
• View shopping cart estimates, discounts, taxes, and coupons beforehand
• Provides an SSL-secure platform
• Provides secure PCI-compliant payment gateways
• Allows integrations with renowned payment vendors like PayPal, Braintree, Authorize .NET, and others
• Allows you to save credit/debit card information for later
• Save shopping carts to checkout at a later time
• Ship to multiple addresses in the same order
• Allows customers to get real-time shipping rates from popular shipping companies
• Order tracking through a user account

 You can explore even greater opportunities in Magento Checkout, Payments, and Shipping with customizations and integrations.      

Customer Service

Whether before selling a product or after, customer service will always be highly important. With Magento:

• Businesses can actively engage customers to convert leads and solve problems.
• Provide greater visibility to the customer by providing feature-packed customer accounts.
• Customers can track their orders, see order history, and contact customer support
• Customers can be facilitated through the admin panel, where customer support representatives can edit, modify or create orders, add discount coupons, change passwords and assist in the completion of other tasks.

Magneto Website Management

Being a high-performance and multitasking platform, Magento allows you to:

• Manage multiple websites from a single admin panel and create multiple users for access and control of your site.
• Have all the authorizations to customize your website and integrations with third-party applications.
• Provision of a CMS for writing product reviews, descriptions, and blogs.
• Take backups or import and export data in bulk while also securing your website with CAPTCHA functionality.

Furthermore, Magento enables you to manage multi-language stores enabled through customized store views for specific location customers.

Customer Accounts

Customer accounts create a more personalized customer experience. It also allows them to track and manage their orders and benefit from saved data such as passwords and payment methods. Magento allows businesses to provide customers with high-functionality user accounts. These accounts can be used to:

• Track and manage orders
• Submit product reviews
• Create a wish list
• Save payment methods, addresses, and digital products
• Check order history
• Submit complaints
• Subscribe to newsletters

Magento Marketplace Tools

More than just making a website visible on search engines is required to gain visitors. You always have to go the extra mile to attract customers. Magento allows you to do just that with its wide range of promotional tools. With Magento, you can:

• Create customer-segmented promotions and content based on set parameters
• Visualize products in categories with customized filters such as new releases, trending, summer sales, etc.
• Customize product suggestions with products marked as up-sell, cross-sell or similar products
• Categorize products for free shipping and bundles
• Easily manage discount coupons for each promotion by generating a unique set of codes and exporting them for distribution on websites and emails etc.
• Manage quantity discounts

Product & Catalog Browsing

Create immersive experiences for customers with Magento as they browse your products and catalogs. Magento allows businesses to:

• Add various images for a product and let your users zoom in and interact with the images for greater detail.
• Show real-time inventory status to avoid any inconvenience after the order has been placed.
• Manage things like product group view, multi-level pricing, wish lists, social media sharing, and much more!

Magento is packed with features, but so is every other E-commerce platform nowadays. Then what sets Magento apart? Here are some benefits of Magento and why you should choose Magento for your next E-commerce Website Development:

Scalability

Magento is a feature-rich platform that allows businesses to scale their website as they grow. It is a highly customizable and high-performance framework that can manage heavy loads and integrate third-party applications for greater functionality. You can start with ready-to-use templates to kick-start your website or code your website from the base for customizations, it all depends on you!

Strong Community

Magento is an open-source software backed by a strong community and owned by the software giant, Adobe. Being used by major brands like Samsung, Nike, and others to manage their online stores, Magento makes up an active community of more than 250,000 websites, according to Web Tribunal. The platform is regularly updated and there are ample resources to solve any problems that you might run into.

Highly Customizable

The Magento eCommerce development platform has a wide range of plugins and extensions that can enhance the functionality of your website. You can choose from a wide range of themes and customized templates as well. However, if you need a completely unique experience, then you can start coding from the ground up and create your own website experience. For that, it is recommended that you hire an expert Ecommerce development company.

Enhanced Reporting Features

From viewing statistics like inventory and sales on your dashboard to detailed reports like cart abandonment, top-selling products, etc. Magento offers the best reporting features. All reports are updated continuously and allow you to have an accurate analysis of your marketplace.

SEO-Friendly

Magento is an SEO-friendly website creation platform following the best practices and allowing you to carry out white-hat SEO. Allows you to edit URLs, create and submit sitemaps to google, meta descriptions, tags, SEO plugins, and more. It is also fast-loading and responsive across all devices, which makes it preferred for SEO.

Also Read: Importance of Ecommerce Development Companies and their Roles

The answer to that is yes and no. Magento offers two versions to users:

• Magento Open Source
• Magento Commerce (previously called Magento Enterprise).

Magento Commerce is the paid version and comes with a hefty price (Starting at $22000 per year). It offers various features to large businesses with high volumes and complex operations.

However, the Magento Open-Source version is free and community supported. It is sufficient even for larger businesses that do not require much support or maintenance to carry out day-to-day operations.

Comparison Between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce

Here is a basic Comparison of Magento Open Source (free version) vs. Magento Commerce (paid version):

Magento Open-Source users must purchase their own hosting as opposed to Magento Commerce customers. Magento Commerce also has the additional benefit of handling multiple databases and rapid scalability. With open source, much reliance is on the community to solve problems.

Magento is a highly powerful, scalable, and customizable eCommerce platform packed with a multitude of features. It is preferred for medium to large-sized businesses due to its feature-rich attributes and extent of customizations. Developers and businesses can also leverage a wide variety of Magento plugins and extensions to enhance the capability of their websites.

You can explore a sea of opportunities using Magento. It is a high-performance tool that can be leveraged to its full extent with the help of expert Magento developers and platform experts. If you want to create a highly unique and customized experience, you need to get in touch with an experienced Magento development company.

CodeNinja experts can help you create completely customized e-commerce experiences through coding from scratch or using built-in Magento features to the fullest for creating a brilliant experience. CodeNinja can also help you with the following Magento services:

• Custom Magento Development
• Magento Integration and Upgradation
• Magento Website Design
• Magento Maintenance and Support
• Magento Migration