Online shopping has never been more prevalent than it is today. In 2019, a reported 1.92 billion people purchased goods or services online. What’s more, with the ever-growing popularity of the work-from-home movement, experts are predicting up to 300 million online shoppers by 2023. Not surprisingly, more and more merchants are closing up brick-and-mortar shops in favor of online stores.
But once you’ve decided to take your business digital, the next challenge you’ll face is choosing a suitable, robust, and risk-free eCommerce platform. How hard can that be, you wonder? Harder than you think: Today’s market is flooded with an infinite number of solutions designed for various purposes. But Magento — used by world-famous brands such as Helly Hansen, Sigma Beauty, Ford, and Nestle — stands out as a truly all-in-one solution.
Our preferred eCommerce solution, we’ve successfully implemented it on behalf of countless startups, and with its recent acquisition by Adobe, one of iTechArt’s most powerful technology partners, we’ve strengthened our ties even further. To showcase what makes Magento such a unique and capable option, we’ve considered it from the perspective of three groups: End user, business owner, and developer.
How Magento benefits the end user
Personalization
What customer wouldn’t love a personal assistant who knows their preferences and can make predictions? Magento tracks shoppers’ behavior and browsing history to offer personalized service, marketing incentives, and products.
Advanced search
Depending on how much inventory you have, it can take a user up to half an hour to find the necessary items. Meanwhile, Magento provides useful filters and comprehensive navigation options that help customers easily discover products and services and check out faster.
Streamlined checkout
Every customer cares about the security of their payment information; Magento features an efficient, secure checkout process to instill buyer confidence.
How Magento benefits the owner
Multi-store
Prosperous business owners can manage a few online stores from a single admin dashboard, saving business time and money. What’s more, Magento equally supports the various languages and currencies of different regions of the world.
Optimization capability
Magento is a SEO-oriented platform, as it offers a lot of pre-built features you can use to help your online store rank higher. Adjust the site to your needs adding tags, descriptions, sitemaps, and URLs.
Responsive design
Over 230 million US consumers reportedly own smartphones and around 100 million more have tablets. By creating a store with Magento, you provide visitors with exceptional user-friendly design for both mobile and desktop.
How Magento benefits the developer
Open-source
Magento is considered an open-source platform: Anyone can use it, for free, without any special skills or knowledge required to create a basic store. On the other hand, if your store does require specific features, an experienced PHP specialist can easily extend Magento’s out-of-the-box utility.
Easy integration
With Magento, developers will have no problem adding new functionality or enhancing existing capabilities; they can easily integrate data, third-party tools, shipping, payment options, transportation services, Google Analytics, Google Shopping, and more.
Speed
Regardless of the store’s product inventory, the site performance should be high and minimally affect server resources. To this end, specialists have determined that Magento delivers 20% greater speed compared to the other platforms.
We’ve reviewed the basic benefits of Magento, but what makes it so uniquely suited to business outcomes? Next, we’ll look at the full range of its operational impact.
How to elevate your business with Magento
Magento is designed to meet all eCommerce functional requirements you might have, period. By no means an exhaustive list, here’s just a sample of what the platform can do: product and content management, experience personalization, marketing and analytics, B2B operations, and behind-the-scenes functionality.
Product and content management
The main task of eCommerce business owners is management, and Magento’s bouquet of tools makes that job infinitely easier. Regular inventory updates are very important for online stores, and so Magento lets you choose between making live adjustments and setting a price-change timer. When it comes to adding new stock, automated rules let you assign products to a category, minimizing the manual portion of the task. And finally, Magento allows three types of gift cards: virtual, physical, and a combination of both.
Unique user experience
In your quest to make customers love your store, Magento offers everything you could want. For example, your customers can make their own wishlists; meanwhile, you can introduce loyalty programs, targeted recommendations based on viewing history, and simple return and exchange programs.
Marketing and analytics
Metrics are a vital part of any eCommerce business. With Magento, you can automate your email marketing based on predefined configurations, and thanks to the site analytics Magento provides, you can track every single activity that takes place in your store, from repeat customers to returns.
B2B
So far we’ve been talking about B2C models, but if you work in the B2B sector, the paid version of Magento will be your best friend. With it, you’ll have access to features like bulk order and automated wholesale purchasing.
Behind-the-scenes functionality
Finally, Magento also includes features specially designed for store managers — action tracking, automated export and import, and advanced permission settings, for example. All of these can be customized to your team’s needs and processes and you can even assign different roles to different managers.
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We hope this overview has given you a clear sense of Magento’s key features as you prepare to launch a successful eCommerce store or enhance an existing one. Indeed, its flexibility, security, and personalization make this platform an unbeatable choice.
And if you’re sold on Magento by now, but unsure how to go about implementation on your own, look no further! Having built solutions for world-famous companies like Freshly, Branded Online, Artspace, and many more, iTechArt experts can quickly and capably get your store up and running while you fully immerse yourself in the development and improvement of your business
Interested? Give us a shout.
