When looking for an eCommerce solution, one of the first names that will com up is Magento

One of the most popular eCommerce CMS (Content Management Systems) available on the market today.

But why choose Magento over one of the other CMS’s?

We’re going to take a look at what makes Magento (in fact it’s the latest version of Magento 2) so popular and why it’s our favourite eCommerce platform.

1. Built for ecommerce

To start with, Magento is a dedicated eCommerce platform (unlike WordPress that has a Woocommerce plugin).

Because it’s been built specifically as an eCommerce platform, it comes fully loaded with a number of features that are there to help you sell more with your store:

• Up-sells – in built ability to suggest up-sell products.
• Cross-sells – show similar products that other customers may buy with the product their viewing.
• Discounts options – a variety of different ways to apply discounts, a few examples are: discounted product prices, set percentage based discounts, coupon codes and more with lots of different filters and ways to apply them.
• Advanced search – give more search options with advanced search and products filters.
• Handles different product types – Magento has a few different ways of setting up products, depending on how best to display them.

But it’s not just the functionality that makes this such a good eCommerce platform, there is also the the build and ‘what’s under the hood’.

The architecture and the way it’s made up has been crafted around making this be a good eCommerce platform.

2. The amount of support

With Magento’s popularity and usage, there’s a tonne of official Magento documentation for everything from using the CMS to installing and developing with it.

There are also a wide variety of Magento support available for those who may not have the time or know how to keep it running smoothly and up to date with the latest releases.

The large community Magento has, means that if there are questions you need answering, someone has likely done that, if there’s additional functionality you need, someone has probably built an extension.

All of this then makes using and maintaining the system much easier.

3. Responsive for mobile commerce

One of the growing trends we are continually seeing today is the always online, connectivity wherever we are.

This has increased our browsing habits and the presence of mobile commerce. We can now shop for anything, from anywhere and that’s exactly what we’re doing.

This, among other things, has made the necessity of having a responsive, mobile friendly website absolutely essential.

Magento 2 is built to be responsive, providing an improved mobile experience, letting customers browse and shop on your website with ease.

4. A flexible CMS

Because of Magento’s open system architecture, it allows Magento developers to help create and build a unique, engaging website experience to best convert your visitors into customers.

As Magento put it on their website:

“Magento gives you the flexibility to customize and extend your platform to create unique, differentiated branded experiences.”

The back end and workflows can be customised to meet specific business requirements, it can all be designed and crafted around what’s best for your business, all because of Magento’s flexibility.

5. Highly scalable

Magento is used worldwide by all types of companies, from small businesses, with only a handful of products and visitors a day to large household names as well as household names such as Coca Cola, Burger King, Tom Dixon.

If you’re a small business now that’s looking to expand in the future, you can do this with Magento, with the platform growing as you do.

With the right infrastructure and hosting, you can have as many products as you need on Magento.

6. Open source

Magento has a ‘free’, open source version known as Magento CE (Community Edition), this means not having to pay a licensing fee to use Magento.

With it being an open source, it also means that it’s more accessible and flexible for developers to work with, and easier to customise the website the way you need it.

7. Multi stores capabilities

With the set-up and infrastructure, can run unlimited stores from one website installation.

This can be used in a variety of ways to make managing your online store easier and from one place..

If you sell internationally and need the multiple website in different languages, you can use the same website design, products, structure etc. then translate all the content to your preferred language.

If you have a large online store that spans multiple product types and want to have smaller sub-sites that are specifically catered to certain product ranges, you can.

All the product set-up and data is still there and can be applied to the sub-sites you want.

8. Easy integrations

Due to the popularity and use of Magento, there are a range of third party services that have easy integration such as payment, shipping and tracking.

All these make it easier to set up the essentials you need for your eCommerce website.

9. Built to be SEO friendly

Like any website, SEO is important in getting your website noticed in search engines, and Magento comes with the essentials you need to make it SEO friendly:

• Page meta details
• Search engine friendly URL’s
• XML sitemaps
• Auto URL re-writes
• Layered navigation

to help you best optimise your website.

10. High performance

With website speed being so important, and seconds on load times affecting eCommerce

website bottom lines, it’s important to ensure your website runs effectively.

It will still need dedicated or VPS hosting for it to run at optimum speeds adn keep load times low.

But Magento 2 has seen big improvements to make it faster, with caching techniques such as Varnish and databse optimisation help to do this.

11. Range of extensions and security

There are a variety of both free and premium extensions available for Magento to expand its capabilities and add extra functionality, these can be found on the Magento extensions store.

The CMS is regularly worked on to keep it secure and up to date, with essential patches being released regularly.

12. In built reporting

Magento comes with powerful in-built reporting tools for pretty much everything you might need, some of these are:

• Orders
• Shipping
• Refunds
• Coupons
• Customers
• Search terms (using the websites search bar)
• Products

As well as more, which make it easy to find out what you want about the website performance from just a few clicks.

We hope this has been insightful and will help in you making your decision as to which eCommerce platform to use.

If you’re still unsure which is best for you, give us a call or drop us a message, we’d be happy to talk things through with you.