As an open-source platform with a massive online community, it is extremely popular with developers, small businesses, and enterprises. Magento is currently one of the few ecommerce solutions in the market today capable of natively supporting an unlimited number of products and allowing complete customizability to its users. What most users like is that it doesn’t take a portion of the store’s profits or require a monthly or annual subscription to use.
Magento is used for building and managing online stores that are capable of high-performance and functionality. It is an ecommerce platform that’s popular with individuals and businesses alike thanks to its high degree of extensibility and advanced functionality in managing the marketing, sales, and operations of an online store.
Catalog management
While there are many solutions for ecommerce stores today, Magento is preferred by businesses with extensive inventories or complex functionality requirements. Magento has one of the most powerful catalog management capabilities of any ecommerce platform in the market today. It supports almost every product type, including virtual and downloadable products, making it perfect for businesses with diverse product offerings.
For online merchants, creating and editing configurable products is often an inconvenient task. Magento’s user-friendly interface and streamlined product creation process makes it easy to create configurable products with hundreds of variants in a single go. Bulk adding images and updating pricing for simple products is just as easy. This feature gives Magento an edge over other open-source competitors like WooCommerce that only allows the creation of 50 product variations at a time.
Advanced marketing features
Merchants seeking advanced marketing and advertising features often prefer Magento over other popular alternatives like Shopify and WooCommerce. Magento helps store owners leverage promotions more effectively to build a loyal customer base using targeted offers. By using conditional promotions, a store can offer special pricing or discounts to logged-in users or first-time buyers, increasing the likelihood of customers making a purchase and returning for repeat purchases in the future as well. Both wholesale and retail stores can create customer groups to provide special pricing at the catalog and cart levels to each group’s customers. Magento also gives store owners the ability to customize newsletters and emails, organize subscription lists, and send out promotions to subscribed customers to reduce customer attrition.
Magento offers multilingual and multi-store support making it especially useful for businesses that cater to global audiences allowing them to create multiple websites localized by region. Support for these features has two primary advantages. Firstly, store owners can use a single admin panel and catalog and customize products for each region based on their infrastructure and customer demand. Secondly, by translating a store to suit the local language, it helps make it easier for customers based in foreign countries and those speaking different languages to access and purchase products that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Currencies and tax-rates are also fully customizable from inside the admin panel itself and are configurable by country or state. Powerful in-built analytics and reporting functionality helps store owners get a better view of their business performance from within the admin panel. Enabling Magento’s advanced reporting functionality allows store admins to view everything from revenue, average order value, and coupon usage to orders, revenue, and tax collected by billing regions.
Extensibility
The platform is best known for its extensibility that’s achieved using Magento extensions. Core tasks of the platform are packaged as discrete modules that store owners can modify and expand using third-party or custom-built extensions. A crucial architectural principle behind Magento’s software development model is replacing and extending core code instead of editing it. This principle helps maintain the integrity of Magento’s code while still allowing merchants and developers to customize a store’s functionality. Magento extensions can be developed with developer assistance or purchased from Magento Marketplace with over 3,500 themes and extensions. Adherence to best practices and maintenance of coding standards is also integral to Magento development, and they’ve adopted PSR2 coding standards for PHP to ensure their codebase is sound. Even the extensions on Magento’s official marketplace undergo extreme scrutiny, and their code is examined to ensure all extensions meet their standards.
Magento can be used by any business that wishes to sell its products or services online. With powerful functionality, a robust code base, and unrivaled extensibility, Magento is one of the best ecommerce platforms on the market today. From small businesses selling virtual products to large-scale marketplaces with massive inventories, Magento’s functionality is customizable to suit every business irrespective of its size, making it a versatile ecommerce platform. A large and diverse user base makes troubleshooting issues extremely easy for those new to the platform.