Image of three interconnected Scrabble words saying “SEO”, by FreeBoilerGrants
According to CloudWays, Magento is globally the second most popular eCommerce platform, beating out Shopify. Paul Rogers says that Magento website development has been used by Christian Louboutin, Ford, Bulgari, and Omega Watches.
If you’ve been looking to set up an eCommerce website, you’ve probably noticed that Magento comes highly recommended. However, before you decide to use the platform or hire a Magento developer, you should check if it fits your business requirements. (If you want a comparison of platforms, we’ve got one here.)
In this article, we’ll help you determine if Magento suits your needs.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Magento is one of the most popular open source platforms for eCommerce. It was released in 2008 by Varien Inc. and acquired by Adobe for 1.6 billion USD in 2018. In 2020, its global eCommerce sales amounted to a whopping 224 billion USD, according to WebsiteBuilder.
The platform offers a flexible end-to-end solution and customized functions for merchants. Overall, it is a great platform for creating excellent consumer experiences.
Since it has a large worldwide community, Magento has been thoroughly tested and improved since its release and has accumulated a host of extensions.
Recommended Reading:
Advantages of Magento Website Development
A Magento website will offer you many advantages. We’ll cover the most prominent ones.
1. Flexibility & Customization
Since Magento is an open source platform, you can modify the code as you please. It allows you to create on-brand storefronts for customer requirements and customized templates.
-
Product categories, look and feel, and content can be easily customized.
-
If you are not familiar with code and wish to manipulate basic functioning within your shopping cart, you can toggle a user-friendly content management interface (CMI).
-
Third-party extensions are available if a function is not natively present.
-
Thousands of features, including promotions, SEO and catalogs.
-
To reduce complexity, you can separate the core parts using the headless commerce method. This does not affect the backend.
-
Variety of shipment, language and payment options to suit your customers.
-
Customizable security permissions, including custom path for admin area, PCI data security, including secondary password prompts, Google reCAPTCHA. This offers extra defence against site attacks and security breaches.
2. Mobile-Friendly
Statista says that, in 2021, 72.9% of all retail eCommerce was expected to be generated by mobile eCommerce. A large reason for this trend was emerging markets in mobile-first economies.
As the number of mobile users rise and people get used to the convenience of mobile apps and mobile-friendly sites, online retailers are pressured to keep up. A responsive website will help you reach and retain more customers.
The shopping carts in Magento are developed responsively, which creates a smooth user experience (UX). This means that your customers can make purchases and interact with your business on different devices, including tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices.
Furthermore, with the consumer data collected from these channels, you can make better marketing decisions and boost sales.
You can also easily manage your Magento eCommerce store since the admin panel is touch-screen friendly.
3. Built-in Features
Magento website development is made easier due to Magento’s extensive built-in features. In fact, you could say it already has everything required for a standard eCommerce website. All this helps to increase conversions and boost performance.
Some of Magento’s features include:
-
Page builder
-
Built-in cross-sells and upsells
-
Responsive theme designs
-
Dynamic rule-based product relations
-
Intelligent filtered search for customers, including tag filters, product reviews, recently viewed products, etc.
-
Instant purchase
-
Order management
-
Catalog management and browsing
-
Conversion, marketing and promotion tools
-
Visual merchandising
-
Business intelligence (BI), analytics & reports with intuitive dashboard
-
Customer segmentation
-
Customer service and customer accounts
-
B2B integration for company accounts and credits
4. Advanced Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Features
SEO helps to drive traffic to your website and generate good leads. That’s why one of the great Magento advantages is that it offers advanced SEO features. It is unlikely that you will need extra plug-ins for SEO.
With Magento website development, you can:
-
Create SEO-friendly URLs
-
Optimize images
-
Set up & optimize XML sitemaps (files that list a site’s important pages)
-
Define mark-up data on product pages with rich snippets
-
Undertake meta-implementation across your site
-
Take advantage of the host of marketing features
-
Generate a Google roadmap automatically
-
Make unique category paths for product URLs
-
Redirect URLs
-
For those with the required skills, there is room for custom SEO implementations
5. Powerful Platform & Highly Scalable
Are you concerned that your store won’t be able to manage your 500,000+ products? Don’t be. Magento is famously powerful and can process a huge sum of orders simultaneously (over 80,000 orders per hour). It offers all the major payment gateways and can handle a large inventory.
Of course, this also means that the platform can handle a ton of traffic easily. It is highly scalable.
-
Grow product catalog with layered cacheable architecture
-
Host many different brands
-
Respond quickly to changing markets
-
B2B & B2C hybrid commerce
-
Extend the store to many countries and reach new customers
-
Simplify workflows with native integrations
-
Add new technologies while maintaining smooth business operations
6. Large Global Community
Magento has 250,000+ business users and 300,000+ developers around the world. Needless to say, there is a large community available for development, customization and support. Extra functionalities can be taken care of by the massive library of extensions.
Check out the Magento forums and Magento support to get started.
Disadvantages of Magento eCommerce
Magento, like any other eCommerce platform, comes with its challenges. You have to decide if the challenges will be worth the Magento website development.
1. Specialized Skills Required
Magento offers high customization – which is why everything needs to be coded from scratch. It has complex architecture.
If you do not have a dedicated in-house or outsourced Magento developer, developing and running a Magento eCommerce website will be difficult.
2. Extra Costs
Precisely due to its size, Magento has particular hosting requirements for the best load speed and performance. Be prepared for the extra hosting and maintenance expenses.
-
Furthermore, if you customize Magento highly, it may require plugin support and development services.
-
As you build your store, there may be alterations in functionalities.
-
If you are planning on a large store, you might be considering the Adobe Commerce edition. The license fees start at 22,000 USD per year.
3. Hosting
Magento, as you probably guessed, takes a lot of space, so hosting on shared servers can slow your website speed. You will need a dedicated, robust hosting server, which will also add to your costs.
4. Lack of Technical Support
When running any eCommerce business, you’ll be dealing with sudden downtime, security breaches, and more.
While there is a large and helpful Magento community, the Magento technical support team sometimes give late or no responses to queries. Hence, your business could suffer or stagnate if there is an urgent need for a solution.
5. Bugs
There are still bugs on the Magento platform. However, it is important to note that all eCommerce platforms have the same issue to varying degrees. Luckily, Magento continues to improve and evolve thanks to its thriving community.
Conclusion
Magento eCommerce offers many benefits to developers, merchants and customers, from easy checkouts to seamless shopping experiences. Ultimately, whether you wish to leverage it depends on your business requirements and goals, and we always recommend exploring your options before choosing any platform.
If Magento is still at the top of your list, you can stop the search for a Magento developer and get in touch with BluEnt. We offer Magento development services to funded startups, Fortune companies, and SMEs. Browse our case studies to see how we’ve helped companies like yours.
Ready to create a smoothly operating, user-friendly eCommerce site with an experienced Magento development company? Contact us now!
Maximum Value. Achieved.