Constructed on the Zend architecture, Magento is an open-source shopping cart gradually rising in the world of ecommerce. The features that populate this sturdy platform include polls, mobile site, order management, manager store, shipments, widgets, coupon code, invoices and promotion activities. The solutions available on Magento depend on the needs of your website: Magento Enterprise, Magento Go and Magento Community Edition. Ranked first in the Internet Retailer of 2015, Magento intends to fuse the digital and physical encounter with shopping by using the virtual commerce platform and the cloud-based solutions. Over $50 billion of gross transactions occur over Magento per year and their customers include Saraiva (Brazil), Venroy (Australia), Zoetis, Alex and Ani, Zumiez and Vizio.
Features of Magento:
Magento provides support for majority of payment gateways and also regulates SEO systematically through keyword-loaded URLs and meta-data generation through extensions. Studded with intuitive interface, the catalogue management tool box allows the client to direct the appearance and operations of website easily. Armed with the aim of increasing traffic and of transitioning visitors into buyers, Magento lays down series of analytical choices – each of them packed with interactive experience.
What sets apart the task of building a website on Magento is its dynamic nature which is marked by its open design and packets of 3rd part add-ons. Magento Connect is the framework within which extensions emerge covering ERP, shipping, CRM, payment processing and call center. Keeping in consideration the manner in which phones and tablets have become the locus of shopping, Magento is equipped with capacities that make the experience of shopping a comfort. These include multitude of gestures like zoom, drag-n-drop and swipe. With Magento, the client can automatically update the website. The scalability of website is also expanded through its configuration on MVC system. Over the years, Magento has arisen as a preferred choice for shopping cart creation, considering the ROI it has generated.
How does Magento score against its competitors? In comparison to its competitors, Magento clearly stands out owing to its unfussy setup and open-source mode. Shopify puts forward only about 200 templates for website creation while Magento is loaded with hundreds of designs and add-ons. The personalization and report creation options in Magento is also more extensive than available in Shopify. Though it is not too expensive, Miva fails in contrast to Magento since it lacks product reviews and list features. Most importantly, Magento uses PHP while Miva uses Custom as the programming language. While BigCommerce overrides Magento with its ease of setup, it does lose points for the limited third-party backup and complicated plug-ins. WordPress was formulated primarily as a blogging space and thus, while it has highly evolved, it does not come with the kind of customizations and ecommerce solutions that Magento provides. In comparison to X-Cart where the coding is fixed, Magento is open-source and more flexible.
Does Magento cater to your company’s needs? When a company creates a website, it looks for certain set of functions: interactive engagement of the customers, higher conversion rates, increase in loyalty & growth and scalability. The constant involvement of customers is ensured through the in-built SEO and high customability. The conversion rates are amplified through the checkout pipeline and personalizable cart. Target-oriented promotion and segmented task allocation also assists in increasing the AOV. Loyalty is generated and retained through efficient post-sale services with order management features (like gift registries and rewards). Indexing of the background and full-page caching also allows the website to nurture and scale.
Magento catalogue: In the enterprise edition, Magento provides website custom made for the needs of your company. Not only does such a tailoring of website allow to increase the traffic, it also stimulates conversion of visitors into purchasers eventually increasing the revenue. With hundreds of extensions and specialist support, your company can take benefit of the open-source structure and ecommerce integration options to create a rich customer experience. Within the Commerce Order Management Suite, Magento provides a cloud-based platform where the inventory can be panoramically managed with the option of using different payment methods. Within the Retail Commerce Suite, Magento aims at creating the ideal retail atmosphere where offline and online services approximate one another. With complete catalogue access and associate task, the Retail Suite is ideal for in-the-aisle commerce. The Community Edition is the optimum choice for those who wish to traverse the dynamic nature of Magento. Apart from ability to alter and contribute, the community edition allows for involvement of the other members for development of the website.
Thus, Magento emerges as an open-source platform for creating highly customizable websites which can cater to the function-specific needs of different companies.
