As a company that deals with plenty of clients that operate in the world of eCommerce, we are often met with questions regarding which platform should they use for their brand new store or if it’s better to transition from their platform to a different one. The reality is the answer is often quite simple. That is if you have a store that sells thousands upon thousands of products with hundreds of variations, there is no reason why not to choose Magento.
Magento is an open-source eCommerce platform, built on PHP and around Zend framework, that comes equipped with a built-in marketing tool and easy management options for yourself. All of this, leads to Magento users to grow as much as 3 times faster than users of other eCommerce platforms.
So what are the main selling points for you, a business owner that wants to sell hundreds or thousands of products online?
1. Scalability
Magento is full of features that allow for shops and stores to grow instantly to the point that they can handle as much as 80.000 orders per hour. In addition, server performance is among the most stable given the platform is an enclosed environment with a very solid skeleton in terms of both security and functionality. However, you do need a dedicated server and not a shared hosting so you need to make sure that the hosting service you acquire will be exclusive to your website.
2. Integration
Magento developers offer a wide range of plugins and extensions that can be easily installed and optimized on your platform. Anything from catalog setup and configuration to payment gateways, database controllers, Google-based apps, delivery services, or automated user-service tools like latest recommendations, on-the-fly suggestions and easy-to-access wishlists.
3. Analytics
Magento offers an integrated marketing set of tools that allow users to efficiently track and predict sale trends, as well as handling orders and transactions with ease. You can access various sale reports based on different criteria and even gather info on your website overall performance. Magento metrics are reliable enough that you don’t need to involve a third party in order to understand where your business is going.
4. SEO
SEO is a performance boosting tool that is very dependent on the HTML5 structure which Magento has. This way Magento can easily generate SEO friendly URLs for your web pages that will help in ranking, indexing and marketing. In addition, Magento offers you an incredibly vast and detailed way of optimizing and control your entire content.
5. Management
Product and inventory management has never been easier. It doesn’t take long to learn and figure out the amount of options you have and how comfortable they are to access and utilize whenever you need. You can track and you can update anything you want, at any time, and there is a large amount of useful plugins that can increase the level of customization and visibility so that you can always have a say in how your inventory is managed.
6. Built-in Functionality
Unlike other eCommerce platforms which force you to install numerous extensions for even the most basic features, Magento is rich-packed with everything you need to set up your shop today. Multiple currencies, multilanguage, multipages and multisites ability, discounts and coupons, reports, wishlists, access restrictions, and many others.
7. Security
Magento offers a secured and dedicated IP and SSL security frame that prohibits leakage of confidential data. Online transactions have never been safer than with Magento.
8. Theme Diversity
Developing Magento is not an easy task as you need both a developer and a HTML coder in order to create a custom template as a result of it’s complexity. However, you can browse today through hundreds of really cool-looking and feature-rich themes that are also affordable on sites like ThemeForest and TemplateMonster.
All in all, Magento is your go to eCommerce platform if you want to create an online business on a secure foundation that is comfortable with scaling and usability, both from user and admin perspective. The increased costs of development are to be seen as a long-term investment rather than just creating a means to sell, as a commitment to Magento is a commitment to quality and stability.