We’ve blogged recently about the characteristics of a strong online store that best represents your business. A huge piece of that puzzle is selecting the right platform for your site. For three out of every ten merchants worldwide, that solution is Magento.
Magento is an open-source e-commerce platform that puts merchants in a straightforward path to developing the website they’ve envisioned for their product. Between the free to download Community Edition, and the advanced Enterprise Edition Magento’s market share is 29.8%, according to research from AheadWorks.
Magento’s Community Edition and Enterprise Features
Don’t let the fact that it is free to download and use fool you into believing you are getting shorted the features you want for your online store. The Community Edition includes everything you need to get your eCommerce website up and running. Magento themes and templates include a shopping cart, payment and order processing, easy set up for implementing the basic SEO elements, and marketing tools that assist with tracking, analytics, and reporting.
For many business owners getting their online store set up, and offering 100, 500 or even 1,000 items, and accepting payment through their PayPal is all that they need. For other merchants, who upgrade to Magento’s Enterprise Edition, will receive the added benefits of PCI compliance, purchaser data storage, encryption options and more.
But what makes Magento the ideal choice for tech-savvy merchants? Let’s look at five key qualities of Magento:
Customization Potential: Extensions and plug-ins are available by the thousands, and scalability is at the center of Magento’s value. The smallest of shops can get a sharp online presence that matches its larger competitors concerning practical needs and aesthetic standards.
Community Support: On a related note: While Magento is always evolving with updates from its creators, the true strength of Magento comes from its vibrant community of developers. With this open-source solution, your specific pain point in customizing your site, or feature that you desire, has probably already been handled by many other users. Those utilities are accessible via Magento’s large ecosystem of developers.
Simplicity: The most popular utilities are simple to use, and Magento is no exception – flexible, scalable and user-friendly. Its intuitive control panel gives you immediate access to multiple websites and stores and related reports. Custom dashboards are easily created. The built-in content management system makes content and catalog editing and importing a snap.
Built for SEO: A gorgeous, user-friendly website is still useless if it’s not designed to attract traffic Magento eliminates much of the time-consuming work involved in making your site – and its countless product pages – as SEO-friendly as possible. Magento automates SEO optimization of URLs, metatags, navigation, site structure and more. It generates a Google Sitemap for crawlers to explore.
Quality Core Elements: When it comes down to it, Magento will be measured by the excellence of its core features. Regarding transaction processing, page and catalog management, analytics, marketing tools and mobile compatibility, Magento is simply a top-notch tool with a track record of satisfied, successful customers.
And, of course, it helps if you have an elite hosting provider with top-notch hardware and networking, and 100% availability guarantees. Learn more about what Hostway can do for your e-commerce site.