Choosing an e-Commerce solution can be a tricky proposition. There are several popular e-commerce solutions which offer more or less the same features, but also face limitations. Choosing the right solution can mean the difference between the success and failure of a business.
More than 150,000 business including may world famous brands use “Magento” as their e-Commerce solution. Why has Magento become so popular? We look at nine positive aspects of Magento which make it a winner for many businesses.
1. Budget: Every business owner prefers to keep their initial investments minimised. Magento can be made to work with almost every budget. Whether you are a start-up or an established brand, Magento has various levels of customisation, modules and complexity levels which can be tweaked to suit your budget.
2. Open source: Magento is an open source e-Commerce solution. This means that the source code is publicly available and you are not bound to any service agreements. The code base keeps improving with the input of the community and you can release your own code back into the community for it to be improved.
3. Scalability: Magento is a scalable e-commerce solution and provides you the freedom to evolve the solution as your own business needs demand more from it.
4. One roof: Magento allows you to manage all content pages, sales and invoicing, categories and products under one roof and from one back office. You can have several logins all with different levels of access for multiple users and build your business around how you expect to manage your e-commerce offering.
5. Search engine friendly: Magento can be fully optimised for keywords and is incredibly search engine friendly. Clean URLs, meta tags for products, categories and pages help to improve your store’s visibility in all search engines. Google sitemap also gives a sound basis and foundation for further SEO.
6. Features and modules: The scalability of Magento is built in to the platform through the availability of several modules and plug-ins that can be utilised to boost the site’s features quickly and easily. As the code is all open source, these modules and plug-ins are free to use and you can contribute to them too.
7. Promotions and marketing: Online store owners spend thousands of dollars to market their store but Magento has an in-built Newsletter feature which enables business owners to effectively communicate with customers. Magento allows you to set up discount vouchers, tiered pricing, up sells, cross sells and related items. You can also send to a friend, tag products and integrate Google Base to sell your products through Google Shopping too.
8. Versatile design: The outstanding look and feel of Magento comes in three offerings; out-of-the-box theme, an out-of-the-box theme with some customisation or completely bespoke design which can be fully customised. An huge range of third party themes are also available, which can be bought at minimal prices.
9. Reporting: Strong reporting features give you real insight to your store, customer behaviours and sales records. This deep reporting lets you configure and customise the store to maximise sales by tracking where customers are dropping out, which products are selling better and what to highlight in the store for increasing sales.