Having gone through the key advantages of adopting Magento as your solution of choice when it comes to e-commerce, we now consider the benefits and features of Magento. For that, we have invited Syed Muneeb Ul Hasan, the Magento Community Manager at Cloudways, the popular Managed Magento Hosting Platform to provide insights.
Magento is a leading Content Management System (CMS). Magento offers all the standard elements and functions that are essential for a successful web store. Also, It is the premier go-to CMS for web store owners that have thousands of products to offer, deal with a large volume of traffic and provide a comprehensive set of features and designs.
More than 250,000 merchants around the world are currently using Magento to power their e-commerce stores. Henceforth, Magento is a go-to choice for many online businesses.
Magento doesn’t only support big organizations like Nike, Coca-Cola, Ford, FoxConnect, etc. but it’s also the backbone of many Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) and growing startups.
In this post, you will see why an online business should choose Magento for selling its products online. We will dive into the factors to consider while building an e-commerce store with Magento. Let’s start with the benefits and key features of Magento for your ecommerce store.
Benefits of Magento as a Sales Channel
I’m not sugar-coating things about Magento. It’s true, I am a die-hard fan of Magento for e-commerce. It comes down to premium features, user-friendly navigation, and a commendable structure that makes the store performance outstanding.
Many reasons tend to entice big companies and other online merchants to choose Magento e-commerce to sustain their online businesses. Here are some of the essential reasons that developers and store owners tend to prefer Magento over other e-commerce platforms.
1. Reliability
Magento was already a popular CMS out there, but it got a business boost after its acquisition by Adobe in 2018. It further enhanced the brand’s reputation and image in the community.
Magento is considered a reliable e-commerce platform because it’s an open-source that offers robust features and flexibility. Following are some of the important points that make Magento a reliable platform for e-commerce businesses.
- Magento allows you to manage multiple websites from a single admin panel for a particular version.
- Developers are free to customize themes as per various requirements.
- As a store owner, you can leverage a Magento CMS for the landing page.
- Moreover, Magento is 100% SEO friendly and offers one-page checkout, various shipping options, secure payment gateways, and much more.
2. Highly Scalable & Flexible
Magento CMS is capable enough to handle more than 80,000 transactions per hour and manage up to half a million products on one site. It’s one of the advantages of using Magento for your online business.
It means that you can expand your store at any time as your business expands, especially during the peak sales season.
3. Security
Security is an important factor for any online business. The developers at Magento are keen to protect every single e-commerce website from vulnerabilities and brute force attacks. Moreover, they try their level best to ensure ironclad security by realizing new updates and security patches regularly.
4. High-Performance
Magento brings peace to your life and wiped out all your slow page loading, slow searching, and other speed-related woes. Magento uses modern technology that includes Varnish, Memcached, FPC, Redis, and other optimized database options. All together brings top-notch e-commerce performance with high user engagement while utilizing minimal server resources.
5. Better Mobile Experience
Most online buyers prefer smartphones over laptops or personal computers. According to the statistics, 79% of smartphone users had made a purchase online using their smartphones during the last six months of the year 2019.
It’s necessary to consider a responsive store design for your Magento online store that is compatible with any kind of device. Moreover, it offers a better shopping experience and meets the demands of your users, Magento offers HTML5, allows adjusting the image size, and support product videos.
6. Ease of Integration
Third-party extensions and themes play a vital role in the development of a Magento-powered online store. Magento is an e-commerce platform that easily integrates a large number of third-party services including payment gateways, shipping, order tracking features, etc.
7. Progressive Web Application (PWA)
Magento recently built its own Progressive Web Application (PWA) studio that introduces the new era of frontend web development. The Magento PWA Studio helps developers build an e-commerce platform that offers high speed, is capable to run in offline mode, is readily responsive to all types of screens, etc.
8. Custom Development
Developers love the word ”Open Source”. Magento facilitates developers allowing them to make changes in the source code and have full control over custom development. Being a developer, you can customize the online store as per the requirements of the merchants.
Magento Pricing
The features and benefits of Magento are valuable but what about the pricing? Magento has two major variants, one is Magento Community Edition that’s for a developer that doesn’t charge any cost. You just have to download and start developing your e-commerce store right away. The other one is Magento Enterprise Edition which comes with a lot more additional and premium features. Magento Commerce pricing starts from $22,000 and high as $190,000 per year.
Additional Magento-related costs will also come into play. Check out a typical list of estimates in the following pricing table for Magento.
Magento Editions, Installation, and Hosting
The Magento Community Edition is the premier choice for many companies that are serious about e-commerce but are only getting started at it. It’s free of cost and it is capable enough to deal with a large number of products as well. It is compatible with Magento 1. x – 2.3.x. Furthermore, The Magento Enterprise Edition comes with a price tag, which unlocks more exciting features and technical support.
If you are willing to use Magento, you must understand that different Magento versions have a different set of requirements that you need to fulfill. For instance, if you want to use Magento 2.3 for your online store development, you must ensure that the following technical requirements are fulfilled to get an optimized and flawless store performance:
- MySQL 5.6, 5.7
- MariaDB 10.0, 10.1, 10.2
- Percona 5.7
- MySQL NDB Cluster 7.4.*
- PHP versions: 7.1.3, 7.2.0
- Apache 2.2 or 2.4
- Varnish version 4.x or 5.2
- Redis version 3.2, 4.0, 5.0
- RabbitMQ version 3.7.x
The installation of the above requirements typically isn’t a piece of cake. In addition, it takes a lot of effort, time, and energy in this time-consuming installation process.
However, if you don’t want to get into the technicalities, then a managed Magento hosting solution is one reliable approach that meets all the requirements that Magento supports, and it will enable you to install Magento easily.
Here’s a quick way to launch your Magento server with Cloudways and get all the server requirements to streamline your store’s processes.
Final Words
All in all, building an eCommerce store will be easier with Magento due to the fact that it provides all the features and benefits that we already discussed. I hope after reading this, building an e-commerce store with Magento shouldn’t be stressing you and you might have a road map to start your store.
In my opinion, Magento is among the best options to get started with your e-commerce effort and scale it to the new horizons of success. Above all, Magento has a great community and customer support team which is always ready to assist developers and online merchants.
If you have any point of view or any feedback on this post, don’t forget to use the comment section below.
Megaventory note: Magento version is available in Cloudways you can install the Megaventory extension to start managing your Magento stock too across multiple locations, user permissions, and other such configurations.
Dimitris Athanasiadis oversees Operations and Customer Relations in Megaventory.