How about choosing the most popular e-commerce solution in the world? That’s right, none of the above platforms are the most used in the industry. Magento is used by 20% of all e-commerce sites on the Internet. That’s impressive! One reason is that Magento is flexible and extensible, with a convenient methodology. You can add almost any feature to your site – and that’s why so many large and fast-growing companies select Magento. In this Magento review, we’ll take a look at the best features of the platform, as well as pricing and customer support.
The fact that Magento is so popular may not shock some of you. I get the feeling that others shrug their shoulders about what Magento even provides. E-commerce solutions usually come in one of three forms: Created for people with no programming experience, some experience, or a lot of experience.
Magento falls into the category of people with professional web development experience, and while mid-level developers can definitely handle Magento, it tends to be implemented on medium to large e-commerce sites with some money to spend on a web person or department. Nonetheless, keep reading our Magento review to see what it has to offer you.
Table of Conte
Benefits of Magento
You get a free, flexible solution filled with amazing features.
Magento is one of the most scalable tools for building websites, and it benefits from a large community. However, it also requires a lot of developer skills and a significant investment. Let’s evaluate the benefits:
- Free download thanks to its open-source design
- User-friendly – great for people who want to learn
- Extensive internal user interface with many features available
- Impressive feature set, expandable and customizable to your liking
- Highly scalable – great for growing companies
- Global community of loyal users
- Huge number of payment gateway integration options
- Lots of options for customizing your theme and template design
Features of Magento
PowerSync emphasizes that Magento has one of the most extensive feature lists you will ever find in terms of e-commerce software. This is the exact reason why the stakes are so high and why all Magento customers are large corporations.
Everything from marketing to customer segmentation is included. Standard features come with Magento open source, so you can work on search engine optimization with Google sitemap tools, Google content APIs and search engine-friendly URLs.
Marketing and conversion tools include coupon codes, customer groups, product bundles and newsletter management. The list is really endless when it comes to features, but here’s a comprehensive breakdown of the most important areas:
SEO
- Marketing, promotions and conversions
- Site management
- Catalog management
- Catalog Viewing
- Product Viewer
- Checkout, payment and shipping
The best way to get a complete picture of Magento’s features is to separate feature lists by segment. For example:
Marketing:
- Coupons: flexible codes and offline options
- Customer groups: segment by demographics, location, etc.
- Recently viewed / compared products: for targeted recommendations
- Related products / cross-sell and additional sales: to drive more purchases
- Wish list sharing: customers can send wish lists via email
- Share on social media: show what customers have bought on social media.
- Constant shopping cart: save shopping carts when customers leave the site
SEO:
- Matching Google sites for online rankings
- Customizable URLs: rewrite and customize for easy SEO
- Metaformation: include data for every page of your online store.
Admin:
- Support multiple stores: manage multiple websites from one account
- Printing: for packing lists, invoices, labels, etc.
- Create and edit orders: use your admin panel as a virtual terminal
- Mass export/import: use CSV files to simplify migration
- Permissions management: full access to different functions for users
Catalog / Inventory Management:
- Support multiple product types: virtual, grouped, linked, personalized, etc.
- Unlimited Attributes: add all attributes to your product page.
- Predefined attributes: optimize attribute management
- Product sorting: reduce the learning curve for finding products
- Pricing rules: provide discounts on products ordered as a bundle.
Product images:
Display multiple images in the message.
Delivery, checkout, and analytics:
- Integration with Google Analytics
- Built-in reporting on sales, taxes and abandoned carts
- For smartphones: Basic design compatible with responsive themes
- One-page checkout: make shopping fast and easy
- Custom checkout: create a checkout to match your version of magento or web design
- Guest ordering: attract customers who don’t want to sign up for e-commerce sites.
- Order tracking: track confirmed orders on your website
- Tax and shipping estimates: specify prices from day one
As the Magento community often laments, something is missing from Magento open-source e-commerce. For example, there’s no built-in rewards program or abandoned cart recovery. These are features that come standard with Magento Commerce. If you do decide to use open-source features, you can work with the developer to create a Magento extension for the missing features.
Magento Overview: ease of use
Magento is not at all easy to use if you are a newbie. Frankly, if you have no development experience and plan to work on the site yourself, skip Magento entirely. It’s only for businesses that don’t have meager budgets.
Developers find the Magento Interface quite reasonable because it has a quick and easy self-hosted setup, and everything is consolidated into a navigation menu such as customers, products, promotions, sales, and reports.
Magento Overview: Inventory
Magento Inventory Management allows you to make various modifications to keep up with what items go in and out of your store. For example, you can check items with outstanding orders and modify the numbers for minimum and maximum quantities.
Magento Inventory
Sell downloadable products in your store, assign unlimited product attributes and even moderate product tags and reviews to maintain full control over your own site.
You can also link to a wide range of sales channels, such as eBay and Amazon. What’s nice about Magento integration is that your entire inventory syncs with the website. That way, your customers won’t have to buy items that aren’t in stock and rely on them.
Another thing I like about Magento inventory is the automation. Algorithms are used to calculate shipping costs and taxes. You can also give your customers some unique buying options, such as an on-site inventory search and an instant buy button. Global selling also gives you a big advantage because you can support things like multiple currencies and languages.
