This trend has confirmed the need to create an online store for any business activity. If you want to have a successful e-commerce website, Magento is one of the most popular CMS to optimize your conversion rate and make it easy to manage your online store.
What is Magento?
Purchased by Adobe in 2018, Magento is an open source tool for the development and administration of online shopping websites. The Magento e-commerce platform offers an intuitive interface for creating and editing product pages and sheets, as well as simple catalogue, order processing and payment organization for multiple stores at once.
There are more than 240,000 e-commerce sites developed by Magento, including sites of well-known brands such as Coca-Cola, Ford, Fox Connect, Vizio, Christian Louboutin, Nike, Nestle Nespresso, Rebecca Minkoff, etc.
What is Magento commerce?
Magento commerce is the premium version of Magento. By paying an annual subscription fee, you can access additional options such as:
- Cloud hosting;
- Advanced marketing features (segmentation, targeting, customer loyalty, page personalization, etc.)
What is Magento Cloud?
In its standard version, Magento must be installed locally on the site’s server. In case this server encounters a problem, the administrator may not have access to his site. On the other hand, the paid cloud version allows installing the site on an Adobe server online in a more reliable and secure way.
12 benefits of an e-commerce site
Is Magento a CMS?
Yes, Magento is a content management system (CMS) for creating online stores.
What is a CMS?
A CMS is a category of software that allows you to create, manage and update websites or mobile applications dynamically without the need to use development code.
For the software to be considered a CMS, it must:
- Be used simultaneously by several users by offering them specific authorizations (administrator, contributor, editor, etc.);
- Propose a content management chain;
- Enable separate management of content and form.
There are two types of CMS: open source CMS (the most popular) and proprietary CMS which are less vulnerable to cyber attacks. WordPress is the best known CMS for website design. About two thirds of websites in the world are developed using this free open source CMS.
Development of e-commerce sites
Advantages of choosing Magento for your online store
Magento e-commerce website development offers several advantages whether it is for developers, administrators or visitors of a site.
Advanced eCommerce Solutions
Magento is equipped with several features to refine the user experience (UX):
- Ergonomic navigation;
- Easy to adapt to various products;
- Grouping of products according to their themes and characteristics.
Moreover, Magento commerce developers do not face any difficulties in customizing the design, attributes, back-office configuration, etc.
Services available worldwide
The Magento online store can be adapted to different languages and currencies. It also accepts a multitude of credit cards in order to be accessible from any country in the world.
Clear and relevant statistics
Magento provides you with detailed statistics to analyze and optimize your online business strategy.
Reports include:
- The characteristics of visits (flow of visitors, time spent, pages visited, products consulted, etc.);
- Sales (overall turnover and by category, products sold, products in stock, etc.);
- New products available on the market;
- And so on.
Simple order management
The order management system of the Magento digital platform allows you to:
- Sort and send orders according to the date of purchases made by customers;
- Extract purchase orders and invoices;
- Keep your customers informed about the progress of their orders via email notifications;
- Create new replenishments.
Responsive e-commerce site
Magento supports different digital media (smartphone, desktop and tablet). The proposed themes and features perfectly adapt to the dimensions of the device used. This allows you to acquire a larger number of visitors.
Magento multistore
Magento allows you to manage multiple online stores from a single interface in a quick and easy way. You can configure your preferences and catalogues as well as track the performance of each store.
Integration with Google services
With the integration of Google tools such as Google Analytics and Google Checkout into the Magento platform, the latter has been able to improve its services such as:
- Follow-up and payment of orders;
- Downloads of various web contents;
- Follow-up of purchases.
Magento can also be integrated with other software of your company.
Optimized natural referencing
Magento’s tools are fully compliant with SEO techniques required by search engines like Google. This helps to improve the visibility of your website online and get more traffic.
Powerful marketing tools
In order to promote your online store, Magento provides you with powerful marketing tools according to your business needs. The digital platform helps you optimize your advertising campaigns through:
- Specific extensions for sales development (Live sales notification, gift cards, Facebook chat, etc.);
- Discount coupons;
- Loyalty programs;
- Group purchases;
- Promotional prices;
- Private sales;
- Optimized landing pages;
- And so on.
Telemarketing and customer acquisition
Easy to add additional functionality
Whether developed by the Magento team or by third-party developers, there are several extensions that can be useful in your e-commerce. These do not pose any risk of disrupting the architecture or basic functionality of your site.
Simplified coding
Magento is a CMS that uses simple coding that is accessible to any user. All the manipulations are understandable. This allows you to manage your products and add content to your e-commerce site without the need for a developer. This allows you to save time and money.
Flexibility for companies
To take full advantage of its benefits, Magento offers versions according to the size of the company. For example, Magento Go is recommended for VSEs and PEs, while Magento Enterprise is intended for medium and large companies.
Open source software
The advantage of open source software is the contribution of many stakeholders in improving the functionality and features of the digital platform.
Continuous evolution
Magento developers do not stop bringing new solutions. The Magento 2 version, for example, provides interesting advantages compared to Magento 1:
- Page loading in Magento 2 is 30 to 50% faster than in Magento 1;
- Magento 2 can handle 10 million visits per hour, against only 200,000 for Magento 1;
- The server response time in Magento 2 is almost instantaneous when browsing the catalog;
- More intuitive graphical interface.
How to configure Magento
Installing and configuring the Magento digital platform does not require extensive knowledge of computer development. All it takes is:
- To have the prerequisites for the installation: download Magento installation files, use a server compatible with Magento, choose a domain name and use an FTP client to install Magento on a server;
- Install the Magento file on your server;
- Install Magento and configure your e-commerce site;
- Access the Magento administration panel to develop your site.
How to create an online store?
How does Magento work?
After installing Magento on your server, you can access the main interface to:
- Install a free or paid theme according to your preferences;
- Customize the look of the theme;
- Add the extensions you deem necessary;
- Add the pages of your site;
- Create content;
- Add product categories and products (description, prices, labels, etc.);
- Monitor the performance of your online store;
Most operations do not require the use of codes, except for advanced customizations.
E-commerce website development services
If you want to create your online store or improve your existing site, the Publi Web Media agency offers effective development and optimization solutions. No matter which CMS you use (Prestashop, Magento or Woocommerce), our experts are able to help you improve your online sales.
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