Magento eCommerce – Variants, Benefits & Fit for your Online Store

Summary: In a world of digitized lives and the dominance of online shopping, the functionality, and smoothness of an eCommerce platform are essential to a brand’s success. The success of primary metrics like traffic, conversion rates, and customer engagement depends on the platform’s performance. Magento (now Adobe Commerce) has emerged as the dominant enterprise eCommerce platform in recent years. Read our article to gain more insights.

Magento is one of the best eCommerce platforms, with built-in PHP. As we know it over the years, this is what the platform signifies:

• A share of more than 13% of all eCommerce sites.
• Powering 1.2% of the internet.
• Over 250,000 merchants operate their business using it (including some of the biggest names like Christian Louboutin, Ford, HP Inc., and Nike.)
• One of the ten most popular eCommerce platforms in 2021.
  Over $155 billion in transactions are handled every year.
• Downloaded 5000 times a day.

Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for the Gartner Digital Commerce Platforms research report – and in 2022, Adobe was named a leader in the Gartner Report. This has been a series of wins demonstrating the platform’s steady growth, robustness, and cutting-edge technology.

What’s the Magento Storyline?

Magento was released in March 2007 by Varien and developed by Zend Framework. It was finally released in March 2008 under the name ‘Bento.’ Over the years, it won several awards, like the “Best of Open Source Software Awards” and “SourceForge Community Choice Awards.”

Subsequently, more editions were released. The community edition was released in June 2008, the enterprise edition in April 2009, and the mobile one in May 2010. In 2011, eBay took a 49% ownership share in the company, which was taken out by Permira later. Finally, Adobe acquired it in 2018 – a step that helped Magento establish itself in the enterprise sector.

The Magento variants – Open Source, Commerce, and Magento 2

Known as Magento Community in the past, Magento Open Source is the accessible version of Magento that is available for everyone to download, customize, and self-host. The users can also access several extensions and themes. Open Source has been the preferred choice of several small and mid-size businesses.

Earlier, there were two versions of Magento – Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. However, now it is a single version – Magento Commerce, which is also a premium version for higher support levels and a broad range of functionalities.

The latest update launched is Magento 2, which took care of the lacunas pointed out by developers. Magento 2 came out as the faster (50% better loading speed), safer, more efficient, and more scalable version. It offers greater security, a more engaging customer experience, and flexible website architecture.

As far as the Magento eCommerce pricing is concerned, the license fees start from $24,000 for a year for Magento 2 and allow more features, customer reward programs, targeted promotions, and 24/7 support. Additionally, businesses can choose either an on-premise deployment or host the solution on a cloud.

Benefits of Magento eCommerce Platform for your Business

The open-source platform drives impact and sales significantly, making it the preferred choice for marketers and developers. Magento eCommerce solution is easy to deploy, offers enhanced security (DevSecOps approach), and, most importantly, provides customers with an improved shopping experience. It is a little surprising then that Magento has evolved over the last decade to become one of the most sought-after platforms with persistent improvements and upgrades—Magento2 being one of them.

1. Customizable

Magento lets you customize almost everything, from the look of your website to the design of the categories and offerings. It is an open-source platform and offers numerous plugins for accounting, payment, processing, and shipping.

Magento tools are beginning to take advantage of the Adobe intelligence layer they call Sensei. They use it in conjunction with Adobe Analytics and Adobe Target to collect data and offer more personalized recommendations.

The design themes of Magento may not be relevant if you wish to heavily customize your site. You might want to code from scratch. Many businesses partner with Magento developers to build a site that caters to their needs and products. Magento supports 3rd party integrations such as payment gateways.

2. SEO Friendly

What is better than using a platform that encourages organic traffic? Magento is super-efficient for Search Engine Optimization (SEO), leading to better visibility for your products on Google.

Magento scores a perfect 100 out of 100 in the search engine optimization domain.

Additionally, the websites created with Magento are mobile responsive and compatible with all screen sizes and browsers—this can get you better rankings on search results too, which is a huge plus. Some Magento web platform features include SEO-friendly URLs, meta descriptions, sitemaps, auto-generation of Google roadmap, positioning layers, prefixes, suffixes & tags that help you rank higher and buyers find you faster.

3. Scalable

Scalability tops the objectives of any eCommerce platform, and Magento significantly assists this by offering hassle-free launches, efficient product migration, and so on. Regardless of the number of stores you plan to have; all the data is stored and managed at a single backend office. It also uses one of the most robust caching tools, Varnish (fastest reverse proxy and HTTP accelerators), which improves the site performance and helps scale up the online stores.

Varnish delivers web content 300% to 1000% faster, with a reduction of backend server load of up to 89% while handling unlimited numbers of simultaneous visitors.

Magento partners update their extensions frequently, adding to its flexibility feature, which is exceptional for any enterprise eCommerce platform. Magento is built to support your business journey and growth at all stages.

4. Flexible

Flexibility allows greater scope for experimentation and innovation. Magento eCommerce platform offers developers total authority over several functions while working on the eCommerce store. Apart from the scope to come up with unique experiences for users, developers can also customize the website’s backend based on the demands of the business. Additionally, Magento 2 is supported by a robust, next-generation architecture to offer even more flexibility while building the online shop. This eventually means a seamless customer experience and engagement for the end-users.

5. Easy to Integrate

To boost sales and ensure a pleasant shopping experience for the buyer, an eCommerce website needs to add multiple services such as data applications, logistics, shipping, order tracking, payment gateways, etc. Integrating these third-party services is quick and easy with the Magento eCommerce platform. The platform also allows businesses to add Google tools, including Analytics and Checkout, to understand the website’s performance and the ongoing market trends in-depth. The ease of integration with back-end systems and robust APIs help speed up the business’s time to market.

6. Omnichannel support & Mobile friendly features

The responsive design that Magento offers & the comfortable check-out makes it a mobile-friendly platform. The responsive theme options can be used on all screen resolutions and devices.

Customers would find it easy to interact with a brand on many channels – websites, social media, mobile apps, etc. It becomes possible then to create seamless experiences on integrated devices, which leads to customer retention. Then, think of all the consumer data you get from all channels – the perfect recipe for better marketing campaign decisions.

Responsive design makes Magento a mobile-friendly platform. The online Magento eCommerce store becomes a smooth ride for users because of its responsiveness and easy navigation.

7. Large community of users

The vast user base of Magento makes it a platform that offers prompt assistance. Since there is a broad community, it encourages the creation of several extensions and plugins. It adds a lot of value to the Magento eCommerce platform. In case of any difficulties, help is readily available.

Major ecommerce platforms – pros and cons at a glance

It’s always helpful to know what each platform offers while deciding on the right fit for your eCommerce business. Here’s a quick comparison of the five major eCommerce platforms in the industry with their pros and cons.

Why Magento is the best eCommerce Platform – Magento 2 Features

Magento 2 offers a highly robust experience with several new features. To experience greater user engagement, smooth navigation, scalability, customization, and other Magento eCommerce features that Magento 2 offers, it’s imperative that businesses undertake the Magento 1 to Magento 2 migration at the earliest.

Magento 2 at a glance:

• Flexible architecture
• Agile and productive
• Efficient management of products, categories, client accounts, and inventory
• Seamless customer experience
• Improved technology for website optimization & customization
• Easier admin panel
• Comfortable maintenance
• Easier testing capability
• Simplified check-out process
• Integration of multiple payment gateways
• Payment Security
• PSR compliant
• Scalable

We can broadly classify the prominent features of Magento 2 as follows:

1. Better Customer Experience

Cart abandonments no more! Magento 2 simplifies shopping, quickens checkouts, and allows first-time customers to complete registration after placing an order. The display of the chosen product images on the final order page eliminates ordering errors and reduces returns. The checkout steps offer order details, making it easier for customers to access them anytime.

2. Improved Admin Interface

Magento 2’s highly responsive interface allows users to browse without encountering many steps and options. Unlike Magento 1, you don’t require to click multiple tabs to create a product on the product pages. Moreover, it offers default options to add videos from various channels. Multiple administrators can work on the website parallelly with Magento 2, ensuring better efficiency, especially for stores with heavy traffic and numerous products.

3. Faster Loading Time

Magento 2 comes with reindexing, a process to transform data such as products and categories to improve store performance. The indexing strategy changes merchant data like catalog data, prices, users, stores, etc., by creating index tables and updating them regularly to help improve the web store’s query speed and performance. 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Not with Magento 2, which can handle up to 10 million page views every hour.

4. Enhanced Technical Architecture and Features

The Magento 2 file structure has been simplified with a single folder for all the codes required for extensions. With improved architecture, it is more convenient to upgrade and maintain Magento 2 than 1. It also has more features, such as color swatches and an API admin panel making Magento 2 integration with API functionality much more straightforward.

Interesting trivia about Magento

• 99.9% of Magento was developed in Ukraine
• Around 10.39% of the Magento stores are based in the Lifestyle industry
• Majority of the Magento stores are located in the US
• The name Magento came from the color ‘Magenta’ which has inspired the theme of its first logo
• The game ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ was the inspiration for the name and logo
• There are more than 300,000 Magento developers globally

Challenges while Adopting Magento eCommerce Platform (and Solutions)

Like every platform, the Magento eCommerce platform also puts forth a few challenges that must be considered to make a well-informed decision. Critics sometimes point out that Magento has a higher pricing model, and if you cannot install any extension on your own, you would have to incur third-party charges too. Finding Magento developers is a challenge too. The development requires intricate knowledge, which can sometimes be an issue. Magento requires its dedicated server, so hosting it is limited at times.

Here are some of the complications that need attention:

1. Slower on Smaller Servers

Magento usually offers a faster page load unless your store is being run on shared hosting. In that case, the speed can considerably slow down and hamper the user experience since Magento consists of 20000+ files and 200 database tables.

Solution: Employ a dedicated hosting server that is specialized for Magento. Hiring Magento developers who can solve the issue efficiently for you should be the best way forward.

2. Technical Support

Security threats and downtimes are an ugly reality of the digital world and require urgent attention. When using Magento for your eCommerce store, there may be instances where you fail to fetch a quick response related to your concerns and hence face a delay in the subsequent resolutions.

Solution: Magento forum can be of significant assistance here, where members post their queries and obtain help from the vast online community. Moreover, collaborating with a professional Magento website development company can help you with support options such as Pay As You Go (suitable for smaller enterprises) and monthly support (ideal for larger businesses).

3. Complicated for Starters

Magento is built on the Zend framework using the MVC approach and comes with various customizations and capabilities. For beginners, making their store on Magento using these options may be challenging due to complex and layered codes. The platform undoubtedly offers a greater creative scope but, at the same time, is a challenge to navigate through.

Solution: Collaborating with trained and skilled developers can build a great product within the specified time and budget. Businesses must hire the right partners when building their Magento eCommerce store.

Popular Brands/ Examples of Magento

The future scenario for Magento eCommerce

Businesses in today’s retail market demand an eCommerce platform help them take the competition head-on. And it is safe to say that managing, building, and scaling an enterprise is highly advantageous with the Magento eCommerce platform.

Magento’s stellar growth and popularity can be credited to the numerous features mentioned above in this article that have made it a favorite of merchants, developers, and customers. Magento’s success lies in its plethora of features, platforms, designs, themes, customization, and flexibility. A successful Magento eCommerce development is also the result of collaboration with the right developers and partners whose skills and expertise can ensure a seamless website.

Magento is one of the fast-growing platforms. It continually adopts AI tools that help remove plenty of manual work and lead to better user experiences. Its PWA studio (Progressive Web Apps studio) comes with tools for eCommerce businesses to create PWA stores, thus leading to fast, responsive, and browser-optimized stores. Headless eCommerce is another facet that Magento will work on – especially in promoting omnichannel sales. Adobe is constantly working to improve personalized marketing with various tools.

Constant software upgradation, the addition of new features, improvements in performance and security, and new technologies (like headless commerce, PWAs, AI) promise to make the future of Magento a strong one. Many popular brands use this platform because of its feature base.