If you are looking to start an E-commerce store? Here is a full guide to developing an E-commerce store and why Magento is the right option?

The success of your e-commerce website is calculated based on your traffic flow, conversion rate, and user experience. Magento is an e-commerce platform that will help you to improve on these parameters and make your website a success.

The wide range of features platforms and themes high flexibility along with the high level of customization that Magento offers makes it the most preferred platform of every web development company is built on open-source technology which helps a user to control the look, content, and functions of his online stores.

The platform is designed for use by a non-technical person as well. It can be integrated with other systems very easily and hundreds of products can be added to it.

This is why e-commerce businesses prefer to work with Magento. Online retail websites have become a must-have for all business companies that are scrambling to get a website with world-class features to attract buyers by providing a user-friendly experience.

Technically speaking it is an e-commerce platform written in PHP. It is written in a highly advanced language that uses the MVC pattern and XML files that makes it highly flexible and extendable.

Magento works on a MySQL database for on-premise installations and Maria DB for a Cloud-based installations. For up-gradation, you need a system with 2GB RAM. Magento was developed on the Zend framework and first released in 2008 by Varian. Today it occupies 30% of all e-commerce websites.

Basic Features Of Magento

Magento development services offer a wide range of features to increase user engagement with your website. Some common features are:

 

• Product Management – It includes many images, comments, wish lists, and reviews of products.
• Inventory Management – It includes the number of pieces left in stock – import and export, etc. can be introduced.
• Category Management- It helps to easily search for products by categorizing them.
• Order Tracking – Allows real-time tracking of a product.
• Customer Service – Helps to upgrade the follow-up system email notifications, etcetera.
• Client Account – Gives the account status, address, and transaction history of the client.
• Payment – This allows several payment methods like debit cards and wallets. It also allows third-party payment modules.
• Search Feature – Allows high-speed search on Google sitemap.
• Internationalism – Allows working in international languages and payment in foreign currencies.
• Report – Enables integration with Google Analytics to create all reports.

Modules Supported By Magento

 

• Extended Search Module – The filter search extension meets the specific request of a user and provides a curated list of items. Not only does this satisfy the customer but also helps in cross-selling.
• Special Delivery Module – Adding a forward helps a lot if the customers are frequent users of this forwarder service. It helps to gain speed in the delivery and trust of the customer.
• Payment Module – Specific payment service providers are always helpful. Even an extra plug-in that allows discounts offers, and payment in EMI is always welcome.
• Checkout Module – Fewer formalities of form filling, auto-updated forms, etc. are helpful in lead conversions. Asking for too much information can lead to the site abandonment.
• SEO Extension Module – This makes the website more visible in the search engines which will help you to increase your rankings on the search page.

The advantages of Magento For the eCommerce Industry

1. Affordable Development

For a quick and affordable website, you need to hire eCommerce developers who have the required PHP skill. The cost is usually quite reasonable but depends on the number of features that you need to add and the Magneto version that you are using.

2. Enables Creation Of Several E-Commerce Websites

With Magneto, you can create several online e-commerce stores. You can manage all the stores from a common dashboard. Big e-commerce giants who want to have a multistore strategy use Magento comprehensively.

It allows control from a  single dashboard and allows foray into the foreign market in different languages. It helps to create special micro-pages for particular brand promotion and allows you to add as many products as possible. You can also create special pages devoted to special occasions.

3. Scalability

Magento can be scaled to meet your requirements. This means that it is highly flexible and can adapt to your needs. This is the reason why all the large-scale and small-scale online shops choose it as their eCommerce website development platform.

Scalability is the top priority for e-commerce websites and helps by making launches hassle-free, and easy migration of products. Data is managed at a single backend office which improves site performance and helps to scale it up.

4. Open-Source

Online e-commerce players can easily customize their websites to suit their business needs due to the open-source platform. eCommerce Web development company professionals can modify the code according to your specific demands.

It is highly flexible so they can add special features and functions by installing add-ons and plugins. It is the most search-engine-friendly e-commerce industry solution.

5. SEO-Friendly

It is considered to be the most efficient SEO platform by eCommerce application development companies all over the world. This makes your product more easily visible on the Google search pages.

This helps to direct huge traffic towards your website. Also, it is mobile-friendly and adaptable to all screen sizes. Some features of Magento like meta description, sitemaps, and tags help you to rank higher on the Google search pages. This will attract more traffic to your website and increase its conversion rate.

6. Easy Integration

All e-commerce websites need to have multiple services like logistics, order tracking, shipping, and payment portals to enrich the User experience. A pleasant user experience will guarantee sales and increase revenue.

Magento allows quick and easy integration of these third-party eCommerce development services. It also allows the integration with google tools like analytics to measure the website’s performance and study the market trend. Even the backend system can be easily integrated. This shortens the development time and the market time of the business.

7. Better Speed

All e-commerce retailers consult Magento development services providers to design their website layout because of the high speed. Loading time is exceptionally fast with Magento which means more success for online retailers.

A slow-loading page will increase its abandonment rate at every step and its effect on sales and revenue will be seen immediately. This technology is trusted by all online retailers, whether big or small, because of its reliable speed.

8. Big Community

It is a highly preferred e-commerce platform, so a big community that includes product providers, designers, developers, e-commerce Consultants, shop owners, solution partners, and users from all over the world has already formed.

The exchange of information and tips for technical support within the community is very quick and reliable. Such a community validates that Magento is fast, highly secure, error-free, and updated technology.

9. Payment Option

Providing multiple payment options is one sure way of increasing the traffic flow to your shop and making it successful. Magento supports several payment options like PayPal, Google Pay, and others.

They have implemented SSL security in order to make customer transactions safe and secure. It also supports external third-party payment modules like e-pay and others. To integrate these features, you can hire Magento developers.

10. Responsive Module

Magento has the standards of mobile web design. Both the edition the free Community Edition and the commercially licensed version works on HTML.

This gives a quality mobile shopping experience as a result your online store is always optimized. It gives the customer a satisfying brand experience. With their mobiles and smartphones, customers can connect anytime anywhere.

Both versions of Magento support mobile shopping by turning it into a mobile app that works equally well across multiple browsers and devices.

From Start to Profit: How To Create An E-commerce Store and Generate Sales

11. Choosing Hosting Service

The retailers of eCommerce industry solutions can select the hosting platform as per their own choice. With Magento,  there is no obligation to stay with one hosting service. It gives freedom to all business owners, big or small, to have their own files and work with hosting companies of their own choice.

Drawbacks Of Using Magento

Nothing is absolutely perfect, especially when it comes to technology. Magento is very popular, and yet there are some drawbacks to it that should be taken care of. Any Magento development company takes care of all these limitations while developing. They have been detailed below:

 

1. You need to hire a Magento developer in order to set up your store properly because manuals do not help much when technology is complex. Being an open-source platform, its users are supposed to add or modify its features, which is not possible for a non-technical person.
2. Magento will not be viable for you if you are on a restricted budget and have a tight deadline. It requires users to have sufficient coding knowledge, which is not available readily.
3. If you are running on shared hosting, the loading time is slowed down considerably. A longer loading time means more chances of disengagement of the users. It works slow on small services.
4. Downtime issues and security issues are always occurring and immediate action has to be taken. But with Magento, you may sometimes get a delayed response which will lead to a delay in resolving the issue.

Although these lapses of Magento are not very frequent, yet you have to be careful and take precautions so that they do not hamper your online business image and your performance level or reduce your revenue.

A Comparison Of Ecommerce platforms

When your budget is small you need to do a comparative study of all the available eCommerce platforms. Let us study some of the advantages of Magento as compared to other eCommerce industry solutions:

Magento VS Shopify

• Shopify is a commercial product so you have to pay for it while Magento is a free, open-source technology
• Shopify hosts your store but Magento allows you to have your own host installation and set up which might need web development and programming skills
• Shopify has a simple interface and is more preferred by beginners but Magento has a wide range of advanced features
• In Shopify, the integration of apps becomes very complex but it is very easy with Magento
• Shopify charges a fee for all transactions which is not the case with Magento

Magento Vs Woocommerce

• With Woocommerce you do not get customer support which is very prompt with Magento
• Creating a website is free in Woocommerce but hosting is a paid service, while in Magento you can have your own hosting plan without paying any extra cost.
• Woocommerce is easy to use on a WordPress website but on other websites, its installation is very complex. Magento offers super-simple installation and integrations.
• woocommerce has a very weak database handling structure for high volume orders and is not scalable. On the other hand, Magento can handle exceptionally high volumes and is highly scalable.

Magento Vs Opencart

 

• In Opencart, customization is highly complex but it is relatively easy in Magento.
• Opencart is not SEO-friendly and needs addons for it, but Magento is considered as the most SEO-friendly e-commerce platform.
• In Opencart the checkout process is comparatively very slow but in Magento, it is super-fast and hassle-free.

Endnote

Magento allows customization according to companies’ requirements and their IT infrastructure. Both newcomers in the business and established e-commerce giants can benefit from its self-administered installation process.

They can create a magnificent store and add innovations to their businesses. The free of charge version of Magento also helps small-budget businesses. It has recently partnered with the enterprise platform Adobe Experience Cloud and extended its commercial capacity.

Out of all of the online e-commerce websites, Magento is undoubtedly the best one. It can support both small and medium-sized businesses. All the major giants like Nike use Magento to develop their e-commerce industry solution.

Here we have finally seen that the benefits of Magento override its drawbacks, so do not hesitate to seek a Magento development company to help you to develop your website and drive your online store to success.