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Why Magento eCommerce?
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The World’s Leading eCommerce Platform

Are you planning to setup an eCommerce website but are unsure which platform to choose? Here we will provide a guide to the Magento platform and explain why Magento is the number one choice for all businesses.

Why Magento is the worlds no. 1 ecommerce platform infographic-thumb

Designing your Magento website

Magento boasts excellent functionality out of the box but it’ll take more than that to win customers over. In order to keep them on your site long enough to use its features and explore your product pages, you will need an attractive Magento design. One of the easiest ways to customise the look of your Magento eCommerce store is with Magento themes.

These can be downloaded for free (or a small cost) from the Magento Connect store, as well as various other websites. You can even download responsive themes for free, which are optimised for all devices from PCs to smartphones. They’ll improve your Magento store’s user experience and also help to increase its search rankings too. It can be difficult getting started on your Magento design, especially if you have little experience, which is why we have created a Magento Design Guide to give you a helping hand.

There you will find all of the tips and information you need to build an attractive Magento website. If you need any other help, you can always get in touch with our team of experienced Magento designers.

Marketing your Magento website

Once you’ve built a great looking, well functioning website with Magento themes and extensions, you will need to think about how you are going to market your eCommerce brand. There are plenty of different marketing techniques you can incorporate into your digital marketing strategy for Magento. SEO One of the most important is SEO. If your Magento site can’t be found through search engines, you’re going to struggle getting organic traffic to your website. This is why you need to optimise your Magento website and make it search engine friendly.

Thankfully, Magento has great SEO features and makes optimisation easy. There are a wide range of Magento SEO extensions you can use in addition to our SEO tips, to help boost your search rankings. Social media You’re likely to already be using social media to promote your new Magento business but if you need a little extra boost you may want to think about affiliate marketing and email marketing too.

Affiliate marketing is great for building professional relationships with influencers and involves paying them a small percentage of sales for their help in marketing your products. Email marketing allows you to engage with your customers, drive traffic to your site and increase your conversions. It’s still one of the most powerful marketing methods on the planet.

We recommend using Magento marketing automation extensions to help make your email marketing strategy more effective.

Why is Magento the best free eCommerce platform?

We all know Magento is an open source eCommerce solution that is written in PHP code but just what makes it so special? To answer your question, we’ve put together a list of some of the reasons why Magento is the best eCommerce platform.

It’s used by all the top websites
One of the ways you can tell Magento is the best free eCommerce platform is by the other businesses that use it. With the likes of Rosetta Stone, Harpers Bazaar, Mothercare, Rebecca Minkoff, Olympus, Nike and Paul Smith all using Magento, you can have the peace of mind that it’s a high quality eCommerce solution. Between 2013 and 2014, the number of eCommerce sites detected in the Alexa top 1 million had increased by 34% to 46,859 (according to a survey by TomRobertshaw.net). Out of all the eCommerce platforms, the results showed that Magento continues to power the most stores in the top 100,000. All of the best eCommerce websites are using Magento, so isn’t it about time you did too?
Fantastic out of the box features
It is not just a coincidence that so many of the world’s leading eCommerce brands use Magento to power their online stores. Many are drawn to Magento for it’s powerful out of the box features, which other competitors are still yet to beat. Superior modular architecture – One of Magento’s key features is its superior modular architecture. The platform has been designed to allow for extensive customisations to both the frontend (in the form of layouts and themes) and backend (re-writes, modules etc.) This means eCommerce merchants can customise the look and functionality of their web stores as much as they wish too. Inventory management – Magento makes it very east for merchants to upload their products, write descriptions, add tags and categorise their products. Any possible inventory management action you need to take can be done in Magento. Selling products – Not only does Magento make it easy for you to upload and manage products but also sell them. With upselling and cross selling features, as well as things like coupon creation, you have all the tools you need to encourage customers to spend more on your web store. Order management – Magento makes order processing and management simple. By allowing you to review, change and track orders, you can get a full overview of the sales coming in and the products that need to go out to your customers. Reporting – One of Magento’s key strengths is its reporting features. From your admin panel you will be able to create and view detailed analytics and reports that give you a clear idea of everything from your top selling products to how customers interact with your website. The information you curate in Magento can be used to help you make better-informed business decisions in the future. SEO – You won’t find an eCommerce platform that is as SEO friendly as Magento. With great SEO features out of the box, including search engine friendly URLs, Google Sitemap generation and customisable meta-information for products, categories and content pages, you have everything you need to optimise your website and improve it’s search engine rankings. Multi-store management – Can you see yourself creating different versions of your eCommerce store in the future? If so, you’ll be pleased to hear that Magento offers multi-store management out of the box. Merchants can create multiple versions of their stores in different languages and currencies and manage them from a single admin panel. Responsive design – The latest version of Magento Community is fully responsive. This means you can benefit from offering customers a seamless shopping experience on your site, no matter what device they are using. You will also benefit from elevated mobile search rankings, thanks to Google’s latest algorithm.
Thousands of extensions

In addition to having the best out of the box features for an eCommerce platform, Magento also boasts the world’s largest eCommerce application market. There are thousands of different modules (extensions) available, each of which are grouped into the following categories:

  • Customer experience
  • Site management
  • Integrations
  • Marketing
  • Utilities
  • Themes

Magento modules are designed to help merchants boost the functionality of their eCommerce stores by extending the core code. Some Magento modules are free to download and use, whereas others need to be paid for. Read our article on how to install a Magento extension for more information about them. Whilst there are thousands of Magento modules available, there’s still a chance that you won’t be able to find exactly what you’re looking for. The good news is that an experienced Magento developer will be able to create a custom module for you. Magento developers know all the ins and outs of the platform and are therefore able to create a bespoke module that will perfectly integrate with the architecture and provide the functionality you require.

Excellent support

Unless you pay to use Magento Enterprise, you won’t receive any support from the official Magento (eBay) team. However that doesn’t mean you’ve got to go at it alone. One of the things that makes Magento the best free eCommerce platform is its avid community of developers and users. Based all over the world, they voluntarily provide support for Magento users, create patches and make the software the best it can possibly be. If you have a question about Magento or you come across a bug, you can simply head to the forums and someone from the Magento community will be on-hand to provide you with the assistance you require.

Affordable costs

Another reason why Magento is the best eCommerce platform is because it’s completely free to download, use and customise. There are some costs involved in hosting and developing the platform, however you’ll find it is well worth your investment, as these services will help you to create a superior eCommerce store.

Great scaleability

Unlike other eCommerce platforms out there, Magento meets the needs of all businesses. It’s completely scalable, so even if you go from selling fifty different products to five thousand different products, it will still continue to offer the features and performance you require, the same of which can’t be said for many eCommerce solutions (just take a look at our Magento comparisons for proof). Magento users can also benefit from the option to upgrade to Magento Enterprise, should their business really take off. Magento Enterprise Edition is the premium eCommerce software. Whilst it costs a significant amount of money (from $15.50 per month), it offers the extensive eCommerce features required by large businesses and enterprises.

Reputation for excellence
Magento has a reputation for excellence. That’s why it currently holds a 26% share of the market, despite new eCommerce solutions being launched all the time. Magento is an eCommerce platform that people trust. Along with excellent features, it offers great security solutions that give both businesses and consumers peace of mind. Customers know that if they’re buying from a Magento site, they can expect quality.

Wrapping up: is Magento is the best platform for eCommerce?

For more information on what Magento has to offer for free read our Magento open source guide. If you are currently in the process of deciding between eCommerce platforms, we recommend reading our Magento comparisons with other leading eCommerce platforms page to see how it compares.

We have also written in-depth comparisons of Magento vs. WooCommerce, Magento vs. WordPress, Magento vs. Joomla, Magento vs Opencart, Magento vs Shopify and Magento vs Drupal.

With so many amazing features and benefits, it is not hard to see why Magento is the best free eCommerce platform. If you need help designing, developing and marketing your Magento store, get in touch with the Magento eCommerce Agency today.