What is Magento – Here’s what you need to know

It won’t be an exaggeration to state that the Mit Crew at Meetanshi is a fan of Magento!

Meetanshi is a Magento development company with experts and certified Magento developers that are keen on exceeding E-commerce excellence each day.

As Magento is our favourite CMS to build E-commerce stores, here’s something about Magento that might be interesting to folks like us:

• What is Magento
• History of Magento
• Top Brands Using Magento
• Interesting Facts About Magento
• Benefits of choosing Magento
• Security in Magento

What is Magento?

Magento, by Adobe, is an open-source CMS (Content Management System) that gives the business owners an opportunity to scale their businesses digitally i.e. in the e-commerce world.

On technical aspects, Magento is an open-source CMS built-in PHP and was created using the Zend framework.

History of Magento:

One can create their own E-commerce store using Magento. 

Magento is available in two editions:

Magento Open Source: (former “Magento Community Edition ”)

• Open Source – Magento is a free platform to develop an E-commerce store
• No initial investment needed – The platform is perfect for small business owners as no initial investment is required.
• 3rd party extensions – The wide availability of 3rd party extensions make it easy to extend the default functionality and enhance the E-commerce shopping platform. Currently, Magento Marketplace is the biggest platform to purchase the Magento extensions that follows the coding standards and are from trusted brands.
• Flexible – The platform has a wide scope of customization and improves the default features without integrating any 3rd party software.

The more extended features of Magento are available in the paid version of Magento i.e. “Magento Enterprise Edition”  However, the store owners using open source version of Magento can install Magento extensions or Magento 2 extensions to implement the additional features in their online store that are lacking.

Magento Commerce: (former “Magento Enterprise Edition”)

• Magento Enterprise edition is designed for big businesses.
• It is not free and you need to pay for using this edition of Magento
• It provides advanced SEO features which makes your store search engine friendly.
• It also is more secure than Community Edition.
• It gives you 24/7 technical support.

Both the editions of Magento are comfortable to work with but one needs to choose one of them according to the business requirements and the budget. One can also use open source edition initially and as the business grows, switching to Enterprise Edition is possible.

Top brands using Magento:

According to the reports more than 100,000 stores have been created using Magento.

Some Interesting Magento Facts:

• Magento changed its logo on the occasion of the CMS’s 12th birthday.
• Magento currently powers 0.8% of sites on the Internet.
• There are over 150,000 Magento developers around the world.
• 9.5% of all Magento websites are in the United States.
• The average order value (AOV) on Magento sites is between $180 and $196.
• The Magento Community forum members list is as big as 360,0000 with 8000 certified developers, 5900 contributors, and 1150 partners.

Source: Websitebuilder

Benefits of choosing Magento:

For individuals and businesses who want to create their professional E-commerce site, then you should think of Magento. It is considered to be the most efficient open-source platform to create an online store.

Flexibility:

Magento is insanely flexible and that’s what makes it apart from other E-commerce platforms. A developer can customize the default functionality and offer the business-suitable feature in Magento.

Analytics and Reporting:

Analytics and reporting play a very important role in designing your further business strategies and grow your business. With the overall reports and analytics, you come to know which product is in demand and which product you need to revise further.

You can integrate your Magento store with Google analytics and can get multiple reports of your store so that you can design your further business strategy accordingly.

Product Browsing:

Have you ever thought about how important it is to showcase your product?

Whether it may be a physical store or a digital store, every customer wants to have a glance at the product at least once before purchasing. You can showcase your products very easily with multiple images as well as carousal which helps your customer to analyze and view the product from ever view.

Catalog Browsing:

Which was the last physical store that you visited? Was that organized or unorganized? Now just imagine if that store was unorganized then would you be able to select the product you want. Probably yes, but after so much time.

But what if the store is categorized and you want to buy shampoo, you would directly approach the respective rack and pick it up!

Catalog helps you categorize your products so that your customer does not face any difficulty in finding and buying products from your store. With Magento, you can do it easily.

Customer Accounts:

The customers in Magento stores can create an account, manage their transactions and orders, wishlist items, and securely pay via a payment gateway.

Customer Service:

Customer service of top-notch quality is essential while indulging in E-commerce. Magento helps with the same by offering customer contact form, follow up emails, order emails, etc.

Moreover, with the upcoming technologies like PWA Studio and GraphQL in Magento 2 aims at boosting the revenue with customer experience.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Friendly:

Magento is an SEO friendly CMS which provides best SEO features like:

• Search friendly URLs
• Sitemaps
• Layered navigation
• Product Title
• Keywords
• Meta tags
• Meta descriptions

Site Management:

Multiple websites can be controlled as well as sites in multiple languages can be developed. Different templates to customize the outlook is also available by which store can be customized in the best manner.

There are many eCommerce platforms available in the market, and even many of them are easy to use but none provides flexibility and security and many other eCommerce features as Magento.

Magento Security:

The security of Magento stores has always been a concern for the store owners as Astra security reported that 62% of Magento Stores have at least one security issues.

However, the good news is that Magento keeps on releasing upgraded versions, the latest being Magento 2.3.4. Also, security patches are released by Magento to cope up with spams trying to harm the business. Meetanshi always encourages Magento upgrade and security patch installation to protect the store’s sensitive data!

About to start with Magento? Here is something that you can rely on:

• Magento Blog
• Magento Devdocs
• Meetanshi’s Daily Tips and Tricks for Magento
• Magento Stack Exchange
• Magento Version Download

So if you are planning to boost your business worldwide, Magento is just for you