If you have ever tried to measure your online business success, you might have already noticed that the metrics solemnly revolves around the conversion rate, traffic, and customer engagement. There is no doubt that all of these metrics largely contribute to the success of your eCommerce platform.
Thus, to ensure your website’s success, it is essential to have a customer-friendly website that brings good traffic and increases the conversion rate. Magento is one such platform that has received a massive response from the motions over the last few years. In fact, a study has shown that currently, 12% of all e-commerce websites and 1.2 % of the entire internet are dependent upon Magento. But the question arises here- Is Magento, right for your business? Or why should you use Magento to build your eCommerce website? Read on to get all the details and answers to your questions.
Reasons to Use Magento for Building eCommerce Website
The number of e-commerce stores in the last few years has increased significantly. Merchants now have a lot of options, including Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento, Neto, Zen Cart, etc. Given the available choices, why is Magneto the best platform for an e-commerce site? Here why Magento is the right choice for your eCommerce platform.
1. Free Nature of Magento
Magento is available in three versions-
• The free version – Community Edition
• The paid version – Enterprise Edition
• The paid version hosted by Magento servers – Go Edition
The community option is undoubtedly the most popular, fully open-source version. Moreover, it also has got the world’s one of the largest developers community that regularly looks for security weaknesses and comes up with new extensions for a smoother and seamless experience benefiting both the customers and the merchants.
Moreover, one can download and install the Community edition free of cost for any eCommerce Store. As a merchant, you can edit or update the security code of themes and install various extensions as per the requirement. However, you need to hire a certified Magento developer as the task can become complicated depending upon the type of customization. While for the extensions, the Magento Connect marketplace is the right location to install the plugins one needs.
If you need a high-end platform with a flawless security feature, you always have the option to choose the Magento Enterprise edition. The features of these packages can offer you everything you need to keep up with the latest trends.
The platform has been customized, keeping in mind the needs of all the merchants. The unique part of the platform is the framework that is built, keeping in mind the needs and requirements of e-commerce stores. While the other management systems like Drupal and WordPress offer additional eCommerce functionalities using external plugins. However, the platform is made solemnly to build online stores, giving it a competitive edge.
2. Option to choose Desired Hosting Service
The framework of the platform allows the merchants to select the hosting service of their choice, meaning you have the liberty of choosing your own flexible or cheap hosting. This option is hard to find on other eCommerce platforms. Moreover, on Magento, one can easily switch to a different host in case your existing hosting provider is not fulfilling your needs. The merchants willing to upgrade to Magento Go can take advantage of the hosting platform.
3. Easy App integrations
As a merchant using Magento, you will need various third party integration and plugins that can help you increase control over the online eCommerce Store. In fact, for most of the platforms, the third-party integration apps are under their control but with some charges for plugin and extension. This is where the Magento differs. The platform has an extensible API that allows for easy connections with payment gateways, analytics, shipment methods, etc. The best part is most of these plugins on the platform are available for free, while some extensions can cost a few dollars.
4. Modular and customizable options
Magento’s modular and customization functions make it more suitable for industries related to fashion, health, and furniture. It is the modular technology that allows the merchants to come up with a sleek user interface that offers an improved customer experience. With the right Magento expert, you can modify all the plugins and templates to meet your specific requirements. There is nothing on the platform you cannot customize. In fact, both the front-end and back-end codes can be customized to suit your eCommerce needs.
5. Superfast shopping cart
Usually, the internet user doesn’t wait for more than 2 seconds for any website to load. Thus, having a superfast online store is of utmost importance. This is because the customers who visit your website and leave without seeing the results can lead to a decrease in your conversion rate.
Magento again can help you with that. By using varnish for better query processing, your eCommerce platform will load at lightning speed while ensuring the functionality. Memcached and Redis are the database optimization tools that make Magento super fast. All of the facilities, when working together, ensure that the customers have a good user experience with fast loading shopping carts.
6. One system for multiple websites
With Magento, merchants can easily manage more than one eCommerce store with the same back end system. In fact, each of the websites can be built on a different color scheme, design and can have separate domains. However, for managing it all, a single admin panel is enough to control the building information, customer orders, customer profile, inventory levels, and much more. It is the unification of numerous stores on a single admin panel that easily facilitates the motions to administer and manage their multiple stores.
7. Better SEO features
SEO is an important aspect if you want your online store to be noticeable on Google and other search engines. This can be achieved by optimizing various SEO features like meta descriptions, meta tags, URLs, category structures. However, keeping up with all of it can be challenging for an eCommerce website with hundreds of pages.
This is where Magento can be helpful. The platform automatically optimizes all the source codes coming from the necessary features and thus saves the merchants’ efforts and time, which can be utilized in essential areas of designing products and services. The process of SEO optimization means that the organic searches automatically find their way to your online store, which in turn will increase your conversion rates.
8. Worldwide network
The number of people using their mobile phones for browsing through social media and buying stuff online has increased significantly. Thus, this has led to an increased need for the mobile experience to be seamless and responsive. In fact, the stats showing the increased internet usage from mobile phones have left behind the stats of desktops and PCs.
However, the Magento platform ensures that the mobile experience of potential customers is good. It’s the Magento HTML5 ability that makes a platform mobile-friendly for the users. Thus, it allows the website to incorporate audiovisuals, drag and drop functionalities, and scaling capabilities.
9. Seamless mobile experience
Merchants lose their customers when they opt to host a website on different eCommerce platforms that do not support payments in international currencies. The website visitors from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Australia are quite valuable. Thus, not having features that accept International currencies will make it difficult for users to purchase from your online website.
However, by using Magento, merchants can resolve the issue as the framework of the platform accepts several currencies and tax rates. Moreover, there are various payment plugins that can be integrated with your platform for accepting worldwide payments. Also, the plugins can be used to display the store in the user’s local language.
Conclusion
In short, it can be said that Magento is a powerhouse platform for building the best online E-Commerce Store. It is also the preferred platform by the top brands and is seeing immense growth among the merchants globally. Given the reasons as to why you need to use Magento for your online eCommerce Store, it must be clear how beneficial the platform can be for your business. However, you need to know that Magento is not a plug and play solution for your needs; therefore, hiring a good Magento developer is advised to build your store from scratch. Professional Magento experts can help you in the process and provide you with an e-Commerce website of your dreams. These professionals are part of the industry for offering quality yet highly affordable services ensuring the merchants, even with an average budget, can hire their services and get a website that is up to date and well-functioning.
Author Bio
Ravi is the Founder & CEO of Web Design Melbourne, a One-Stop Digital Agency based in Melbourne that specialises in Web Design. He helps businesses to increase their online presence with the help of engaging websites.
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