What is the Magento Platform?
Magento is an open source ecommerce platform that offers maximum customizations. Today, Magento is a popular ecommerce in the market.
Magento is an ecommerce platform that provides online retailers with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content, and functionality of their online store.
Magento offers two distinct platforms, Magento Open Source (previously Community Edition) and Magento Commerce Cloud (previously Enterprise Edition).
Open Source is free to download and use, whereas Commerce comes with licensing fees. Both platforms offer users a wide range of benefits and features.
How Does Magento Work?
Magento's core structure is built on a Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture that makes it possible for developers to customize nearly every aspect of a store.
At the same time, Magento's modular codebase allows users to integrate third-party modules and themes to further extend the functionality and appearance of their online store.
This is one of the signature pros of Magento. Users can customize every aspect of their Magento store and create a custom marketplace.
Advantages of Magento:
1. Feature-rich & Powerful Platform
Regardless of the number of products or orders on your online store, Magento is a very powerful platform enough to cater all your needs. It is a platform enough for the store to manage hundreds of products and run seamlessly.
Hence, if you are using Magento since the beginning of your store development, you do not need to worry about the performance and scalability when it grows. The platform also offers certain features like product and inventory management in order to make the website easy to organize. It also lets you set up filters and navigation in a way that helps boost conversion rates and improve the overall performance of your site.
2. SEO-Friendly
The process of optimizing product pages and descriptions with Magento Enterprise Edition is very easy. As it was built keeping SEO in mind, it also generates SEO-friendly URLs. Also, the websites developed using Magento are responsive so your store will be compatible across all the devices and browsers. Along with enhanced SEO, your store also excels at customer experience.
3. Faster Loading
One of the biggest benefits of Magento 2 is the speed of the website. In the world with a millennial audience, the website’s loading speed is very critical.
Recent Google statistics indicate that a 50% of users abandon the sites that take more than 3 seconds.
Despite the heavy load on your store, Magento lets you keep lower load times.
4. Flexible Content Management
Talking about major advantages of Magento 2, Content Management with Magento is also flexible. It allows store owners to customize the offerings and make the store user-friendly. Magento comes with an intuitive page editor, What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) is used for those who are looking to manipulate the functioning of the store. This tool helps edit the web pages without any technical knowledge.
5. Highly Customized
Right from the look and feel of the store to the way you configure the product categories, everything can be customized with Magento. But developing a fully customized store requires everything to be coded from scratch. The platform also offers an option to choose from a variety of payment, shipment and language to cater your customers in a more friendly manner.
With Magento, almost every functionality is possible. A lot of plugins are available that helps enhancing the functionality of the online store.
6. Advanced Reporting
On an ecommerce store, reporting is very critical. With Magento, there are various high-end reporting features that offer nearly 20 reports through the web interface. All the major insights such as orders, customers and products are given by the reporting feature. The report keeps on updating constantly to show the latest information.
Magento General Feature List
Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools
• Related products, up-sells and cross-sells
• Catalog promotional pricing with the ability to restrict to stores, categories or products
• Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories
• Generate a set of unique coupon codes for each promotion and export the list of codes for offline distribution, email, newsletters and more. Easily manage and monitor coupon usage and generate detailed reports
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
• Minimum Advertised Price (MAP)
• Landing page for categories
• Customer groups
• Product bundles
• Recently viewed and compared products
• New items promotional tool
• Persistent shopping cart
• Free shipping options
• Polls
• Newsletter management
• Send to a friend for all visitors or registered users only
• Send wish lists by email
Search Engine Optimization
• 100% search engine friendly
• Google Site Map
• Search engine friendly URL’s
• URL rewrites give full control of URL’s
Site Management
• Control multiple websites and stores from one Administration Panel with the ability to share as much or as little information as needed
• Administration permission system roles
and users
• Fully 100% customizable design using templates
• Support for multiple languages and currencies. Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and third-party applications
• Batch import and export of catalog and customer information
• Content Management System for informational and landing pages
• Tax rates per location, product type or customer group (i.e. wholesale vs. retailer)
• CAPTCHA functionality to help prevent automated software from attempting fake logins. This auto-generated test ensures that the login is being attempted by a person and can be enabled in both the admin and customer login areas
Catalog Management
• Virtual products
• Downloadable/digital products with samples
• Unlimited product attributes
• Attribute sets for quick product creation of different item types
• Inventory management with backordered items, minimum and maximum quantities
• Batch updates to products in admin panel
• Automatic image resizing and watermarking
• Advanced pricing rules and support for special prices
• Search results rewrites and redirects
• Moderated product tags and reviews
• Customer personalized products – ability to upload images and text (i.e. for embroidery, monogramming, etc.)
• Customer sorting – define attributes for customer sorting on category (price, brand, etc.)
• RSS feed for low inventory alerts
Catalog Browsing
• Layered / faceted navigation for filtering of products in categories and search results
- Filter products by price and display a range of prices based on even increments or by a
similar number of products within each range
• Static block tool to create category landing pages
• Product comparisons with history
• Configurable search with auto-suggested terms
• Breadcrumbs
• Ability to assign designs within category and product level (unique design per
product/category)
• Recently viewed products
• Popular search terms cloud
• Product listing in grid or list format
Product Browsing
• Multiple images per product
• Product image zoom-in capability
• Related products and upsell
• Stock availability
• Multi-tier pricing upsell
• Product option selection
• Grouped products view
• Add to wish list
• Send to a friend with email
• Share on Facebook
Checkout, Payment and Shipping
• One-page checkout
• Guest checkout and checkout with account to use address book
• Shipping to multiple addresses in one order
• Option for account creation at beginning of checkout
• SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
• Saved shopping cart
• Accept gift messages per order and per item
• Shopping cart with tax and shipping estimates
• Saved credit card method for offline payments
• Configurable to authorize and charge, or authorize only and charge on creation of invoices
• Integration with multiple PayPal gateways
• Integration with Authorize.net
• Accept checks/money orders
• Accept purchase orders
• Additional payment extensions available through Magento Connect
Order Management
• View, edit, create and fulfill orders from the admin panel
• Create one or multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split
fulfillment
• Print invoices, packing slips and shipping labels
• Call center (phone) order creation - provides transparent control for administrators and front-end enhancements for customers during the shopping process. Changing product configurations, for all types of products, can be done by the call center sale representative on the admin side as well as by the customer throughout the shopping process. Custom product choices and configurations can be changed directly during order creation, in the wish list and the shopping cart
- Includes the ability to create new customers, or select existing customers and view their shopping cart, wish list, last ordered items, and compared products lists, as well as
select addresses, give discounts and assign custom prices
• Assisted Shopping - customer service representatives and other admin users are able
to manage products and coupons in customers’ shopping carts and wish lists through the administrator panel
Customer Accounts
• Account dashboard
• Address book with unlimited addresses
• Wish list with ability to add comments
• Order status and history
• Re-orders from account
• Recently ordered items
• Default billing and shipping addresses
• Email or send RSS feed of wish list
• Newsletter subscription management
• Product reviews submitted
• Product tags submitted
• Downloadable/digital products
Customer Service
• Contact Us form
• Create and edit orders from the admin panel
• Feature-rich customer accounts
• Order history with status updates
• Order tracking from account
• Password reset email from front-end and admin panel
• Order and account update emails
• Customizable transactional emails
International Support
• Support for localization, multiple currencies and tax rates
- Includes support for WEEE/DEEE in EU
• Support for accented characters and right to left text
• Configurable list of allowed countries for:
- Site registration
- Shipping destination addresses with ability to specify per shipping method
- Billing addresses with ability to specify per payment method
• European Union VAT-ID validation facilitates the tax collection process by automatically applying the correct tax rules according to VAT customer groups
• EU cookie notification simplifies the EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive compliance process by displaying an opt-in message at the top of the storefront
Analytics and Reporting
• Integrated with Google Analytics
• Admin dashboard for report overview
• Sales report
• Tax report
• Abandoned shopping cart report
• Best viewed products report
• Best purchased products report
• Low stock report
• Search terms report
• Product reviews report
• Tags report
• Coupon usage report
• Total sales invoiced
• Total sales refunded
Mobile Commerce
• Quickly and easily create a storefront optimized for mobile devices so customers can shop even when they’re on the go. This mobile interface uses HTML5 technology and supports iPhone, Android and Mobile Opera browsers. It includes out-of-the-box features such as:
- Device-specific media capabilities for audio and video
- User-friendly search and results display
- Clean display of product detail pages
- Pinch, multi-touch and scaling images
- Easy swipe between product images
- Zoom capabilities
- Cross-sell and up-sell capabilities
- Drag-and-drop of products to the shopping cart
Conclusion
Like every other platform, Magento has gone through ups and downs. Magento has a strong future.Also, the regular updates and patches are making it highly secured. As said earlier, Magento has lost its position as the 2nd largest e-commerce platform to Shopify. However, it doesn’t reduce the overall market share.