When it comes to launching an e-commerce site, one of the most significant decisions for every online business is made well before the website ever takes shape. It centers on the commitment to delivering a superior customer experience, one that converts casual shoppers into loyal customers.
If you’re considering an online presence for your business, you need to have a clear answer to this important question—Which e-commerce platform do I want powering my site? This seems like a fairly simple question, right? False. There are many options with several variables to choose from, and not all platforms are created equal.
Through my years of experience working within e-commerce I have found Magento to be the most efficient e-commerce platform. It’s not for everyone, as I will describe later in this article. But Magento is one of the rare platforms that allows for complete back-end management by the user.
There are five features I strongly believe that help Magento stand out from the rest:
Catalog Management: Uploading products one by one to an online store is a time-consuming task for businesses selling even just a few products. With Magento’s upload feature, e-commerce sites have the capability to add thousands of items in a single import. The upload can include all important attributes such as where on the site the product should land, SKU number, manufacturer name, price, description, model, thumbnail image, URL path and much more.
Magento also has a powerful catalog management feature that supports multiple categories, products, dynamic product attributes, EAV architecture, etc. Comparisons, wish lists, search results list, cross-sells, up-sells, and related products blocks all work like a breeze with Magento’s advanced capabilities.
Multiple Pricing Options: The ability to price items differently based on your organization’s needs should never be excluded from an online business.
For example, with Magento, if one of your buyers adds a certain number of items to a shopping cart, you are able to set your store’s administrative parameters to offer the additional items at a discounted price. Further, when you change the base price of the item with the Magento platform, you don’t have to change the fixed tier prices. Without this capability, imagine how hard this task would be for a store with hundreds or thousands of items. With Magento, this time-consuming task is more easily managed.
Magento also offers customer group pricing.As the name implies, this feature allows online businesses to offer different pricing to their various groups of customers. This is a must-have for online businesses. With this function, you can set up special prices for retail, VIPs, wholesale, and staff groups. Magento does not require template modifications, layout changes, or other alterations that could break your design. Customers in different groups simply see their respective group pricing.
Magento allows you to hide product prices from visitors who are not logged in, while simultaneously urging customers to log in to view prices. This simple step can help you gather important information about existing and new customers’ product preferences.
Product Alerts:Don’t underestimate the power of product alerts like the ones offered with Magento. I personally can attest to seeing an increase in my clients’ sales from these simple communications that tell interested customers when, for example, an out-of-stock product is back in stock or if a product is on sale. Simple but powerful.
Multi-Store Enabled:With e-commerce, your store has the potential to reach the whole world, but only if your site is able to meet the needs of different geographic audiences. Magento enables you to easily create a multi-language website that automatically loads specific language store views. This allows you to expand to different geographical regions and reach an even broader target audience. If you have thought about having separate stores for different industry product, this too, is available with Magento. This platform makes it easy for B2B sites with multiple product lines and a need for multiple front-end systems and a common back end to manage all of them together.
Customized User Interface:Magento offers the ability to alter designs and modify themes based on categories. With this competence, a business can have multiple storefronts with a single back-end management system. Imagine one site that offers a page listing for baby products and another page for cosmetic products. They can (and, some would argue, should) have different layouts, product filters, and colors/themes but still retain a single back-end system. This is a powerful benefit to provide a buyer because the more relevant user experience increases the chances of conversion.
Order Processing Integration : How you process and ship your orders is critical to the success of your business. Magento’s integration partnerships are second to none giving you a host of solutions to fulfill your orders. Partners like NetSuite, Monsoon, QuickBooks, ShipStation, and ShipWorks all connect directly to your Magento system. As soon as you process an order, the integrated partner communicates back to Magento to update the order status, shipping method, and tracking information.
While Magento offers many features that provide advantages over other platforms, there are a few things to take into consideration before choosing this as your platform.
Magento is robust, but heavy on resources – Magento as a platform is robust and scalable, but that means it is bulky and resource hungry. You have to feed the monster for it to spit fire. It requires heavy server resources and hence the operational costs for a Magento store are a bit higher than the other e-commerce platforms. If you are looking to set up a small store, you may need to consider your running costs to find out your real margins.
Magento requires specific development skill – Magento is a more complex platform that not all developers will know how to manage. If a company is looking for any customizations, module additions, then usually their in-house IT may not be able to handle this. It is based on Zend Framework and hence specific knowledge of the framework is required to be able to manage Magento projects. In that case, they need to find a suitable Magento development company who can carry out these operations for them. The developer community is, however, huge so it is not difficult to find a developer. But since it does require specific skills, the costs associated maybe a little higher than you bargained for.
Magento requires regular maintenance and optimizations – Magento uses a lot of in-built indexes, flat tables, caches, logs etc. to keep the system functioning properly. These need to be kept regularly updated and maintained. A lot of this can be automated, but it is important to keep an eye on these elements to make sure the store runs optimized and provides best performance to visitors.
The general trend is obviously that Magento is not financially viable for smaller stores. However, at the end of the day if you are looking for a future ready web store that is scalable, then Magento is your choice.
Do your research: The right platform can do wonders in making your business a success!
DotcomWeavers, based in Paramus, NJ, is a web design and development firm that specializes in e-commerce and custom development.