Magento

Magento is the open source ecommerce platform most widely used in the world today with $25 billion in sales per annum and over 300,000 stores worldwide. Created in 2001, Magento is owned by eBay and offers an ideal ecommerce platform for a wide range of businesses.

Magento is available in two versions Community and Enterprise. Although built upon an identical platform the Community platform is free to use whereas the Enterprise version is a licenced platform that incurs annual fees. The benefits of the Enterprise version are support direct from Magento, and the platform being packaged with a series of extensions suited to larger enterprises. The licence cost for Enterprise 2.x is based on a revenue share model that reduces in stages from 2.2% under US$1m to 0.3% on US$25m+ (regardless of the number of servers used, unlike Enterprise 1.x which is charged based on a licence fee per server).

We find that Magento Community (the version without licence fees) is generally the most suitable for our clients, with Enterprise like functionality being available through the use of a small number of comparatively low cost 3rd party extensions.

Magento 1 has been on the market since 2008 and Magento 2.0 was released in November 2015.  Magento 2 provides new ways to heighten user engagement, smooth navigation, significant performance enhancements including improved page caching, a more streamlined checkout experience, framework improvements and new shopper experience features.  The backend is also responsive for use on tablets and mobiles.

Magento’s market share among the 30 most popular e-commerce platforms is just under 30% and growing.  Magento users include; Nike, TOMS, Harvey Nichols, Paperchase, Missguided, Huawei, Made, Paul Smith, Bulgari, Sodastream, The Conran Shop, Kurt Geiger, Oddbins, Radley, The North Face and Liverpool FC. 

Flexible CMS – The page editor of this platform is intuitive and allows users greater control over customizing their site and merchandising offers quickly. The WYSIWYG content management interface is user-friendly, helping those with little knowledge of coding.

 

Responsive shopping carts – Magento offers responsive shopping carts, providing a seamless experience across a diverse range of devices including smartphones, tablets, laptops, etc.

 

SEO efficiency – Magento platform is SEO efficient, enabling products to obtain high ranking on Google and other search engines. There are also custom SEO features available. Magento has SEO features not found in any other ecommerce solution.

 

Spacious platform – Magento is spacious for future business growth. It can support 500,000 products on a single site and can manage 80,000 orders in an hour.

 

Up-selling and cross selling products – Customers can find related products while checking out at a Magento-based store. Retailers can present product accessories as well at the checkout stage. All helping to improve the customer experience at the store and increase basket values.

 

3rd party integrations – Magento allows 3rd party integrations like Google Analytics to help in data analysis and site management, however sophisticated reporting extensions are also available.

 

Customized security – reCAPTCHA-enabled login, PCI DATA Security, and prompting for secondary passwords are a few of the measures taken for website security.

 

Search option for shoppers – A dynamic search option is offered to Magento site users to browse desired information. Products are filtered via an extendable range of attributes. Shoppers can search with auto-suggested terms, tag clouds, reviews, recently viewed products and recently compared products.

 

Longevity & Extendibility – Magento is supported by a significant community of developers from around the globe, who make an enormous contribution to the platform, developing extensions and improving security and contributing to relevant patches. The constantly evolving rich library of extensions provides great opportunities for businesses to start, expand, and flourish through enhancing functionality whilst simultaneously saving time and money.

 

Global – A single store can deal in multiple languages and currencies, enabling store owners to transact globally.