Magento offers almost everything an e-commerce site would need to showcase products, carry out online transactions, offer customer service and run all your backend processes efficiently. However, it’s not a plug and play e-commerce platform, it does need some level of coding knowledge to build the site in the first place.
Made For E-commerce
Magento started life as a platform intended for e-commerce unlike WordPress, Drupal or Joomla which are primarily content management system platforms which offer the option of e-commerce plugins.
Some of Magento key e-commerce features are:
User Dashboards
Inventory Management
Advanced shipping and supplier management
Allows bundling of products
Built-in cross sell and up sell capabilities
CMS option
Newsletters
Freedom To select Hosting Service
If you still need the convenience of a hosted platform, Magento Go offers you exactly that along with all the benefits that come with the Magento Community edition platform.
Easy To Integrate Third Party Apps
Magento extensible API allows you to connect to any kind of app or plugin of your choice extremely easily. So be it payment gateways, web analytics or shipping and tracking; find the app of your choice and plug it into your Magento site with in no time.
Modular And Customizable
E-commerce businesses come in different shapes and sizes. What works for a fashion retailer may not work for a hardware and power tools seller. Similarly size and scale of operations, customer service requirements etc. pose different challenges in the e-commerce environment.
Being an open source platform, Magento is expected to be inherently highly customizable and modular. However, with the right coding smarts, Magento becomes like putty in your hands.
Really Fast
45% of today’s web users expect a site to load in under 2 seconds. Any longer than that and they simply close the tab and move on with their lives. Every customer that leaves without buying leaves behind yet another dent in your overall conversion rate.
With such pressure on performance, you would want a platform that loads fast, allows caching of pages easily, while still allowing you to have as many bells and whistles as you need on your e-commerce site.
Magento gives you each of the above and more. It allows you to cache your pages easily using Varnish, retrieve data from gigantic databases in milliseconds, process queries in no time and load pages fast enough to please your impatient customers.
SEO friendly
We all know how important it is to make our websites as SEO friendly as possible.
Magento saves you the development trouble of creating SEO optimized URLs, meta tags, descriptions, URL rewrites, site maps, navigation and category structures and more. Its source code comes with all of these features built right in, saving you a lot of trouble and time, while still ensuring that your site is search friendly.
Run Multiple Websites With One Common Backend System
While almost every other e-commerce platform – open source or otherwise – lets you have only one store on one system; with Magento, you can run multiple websites on the same common back end system.
Every website can have distinctly different layouts and design with their own stores. You can even have different domains for each site. Control all of them simultaneously through a single unified admin panel using Magento. This capability is a boon for e-commerce businesses that operate in multiple niche categories.
