Magento was launched in 2007 and immediately jump-started as a powerful ecommerce solution. After more than ten years, it is still one of the largest and most popular ecommerce platforms on the market. It powers thousands of online shops, appealing to both large and small enterprises. However, the platform has many , such as Shopify and WooCommerce. powerful rivals Now many businesses have a question—what are Magento’s advantages compared to other ecommerce platforms? Let’s take a look at some of the features, design, and development concepts that lead businesses to adopt Magento. Easy Administration Magento UI offers a variety of handy responsive features, being entirely device-agnostic. For example, your warehouse staff can look up stock details on their tablets, while shop-floor employees can use direct access to the back-office through their smartphones. At the same time, employees can have access to individually customized admin panels showing only what’s relevant for their roles. Multi-tier Pricing At the moment, Magento is available in several editions: Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce, and Magento Commerce Cloud (formerly Enterprise Cloud Edition). There are also extended options for businesses of different sizes. Open Source is free, but other editions come at a price. How much exactly can only be found out on request. But if you surf the web for Magento-related discussions, you can find that $2,000 per month is what you need in order to start with Magento Commerce. Online Resources Development documents were always a strong feature of the Magento ecosystem. From its first iterations on, the platform had always had detailed, informative and extensive articles on any related issues. Starting from Magento 2.0, the company keeps this trend alive, having reworked their library with a user-centric focus. It’s now easy to navigate and search through. On top of that, Magento U courses cover a variety of development and operational topics designed to help ecommerce development companies, marketers, and analysts get a grasp on the full potential of the platform. Some of the courses are paid, but they’re usually instructor-led. What does this mean for your development team? With educational materials just a few clicks away, your developers will be able to learn the ins and outs of the platform on their own and deliver a better final product. Content Integration Before Magento 2, the platform was quite rigid in terms of editing possibilities and branding customizations. However, feeling the pressure from more flexible platforms, Magento had to rethink its approach to content integration and included the BlueFoot CMS module into its Magento 2 release. BlueFoot offers a WYSIWYG editing interface and drag-and-drop functionality as well as a possibility to embed media and links to brands’ social pages. SEO Possibilities Ecommerce businesses can’t do without some SEO magic if they want to win in the online competition. For this purpose, Magento has an extensive SEO suite. It includes standard features, such as sitemaps and meta tags, and the whole ecosystem of SEO extensions. The latter will help you manage many SEO operations in bulk, which is a killer feature for larger stores, and employ editing restrictions so that important elements don’t get deleted by accident. Upgrades At the time of Magento 1.x, updating a store to a newer version was like playing Jenga. You never knew which piece would destroy it all. Even seasoned developers dreaded the updates. When Magento 2.0 came, its infrastructure allowed newer versions to be installed relatively easily. Classes within the latest Magento versions are no longer that dependable, which means that the updates can be done much quicker. We can compare it to a Lego set. Before, you had to take it apart completely if you wanted to add something new. Now, you can remove just a couple of pieces, add new ‘bricks’, and put everything back together. The Community Precisely 956,369 sites have ever been using Magento as a foundation, out of which 192,784 are estimated to be live. There are thousands of Magento Certified Developers and hundreds of companies that created Magento extensions. Magento also has a robust Stack Overflow presence, featuring over 94,000 questions at the time of writing. The Marketplace Magento Marketplace went through some turbulent times characterized with the lack of supervision, when tons of extensions were accepted yet a bulk of them was pretty low-quality. A lot of extensions didn’t have proper support. Those businesses that installed them were left to struggle with the consequences. Luckily, Magento Marketplace has made its admission rules much stricter since. Each extension goes through a rigorous review from both the tech and business perspectives. Extensions that replicate other products in any way are not allowed on the Marketplace. This measure was introduced to limit low-quality knock-off extensions flooding the community. The only downside is the fact that extensions got more expensive as a result. However, in return you’re getting overall better products, and the developers get the necessary boost to keep supporting the extension. The limited competition eventually doesn’t allow entrance for developers that rip off other extensions and try to price them out of the Marketplace. Now developers can deliver the best product without having these concerns. Future-proof Technology The current Magento tech stack carries one essential property. It will have a longer lifespan than the earlier generations of Magento. Big data, machine learning, IoT, and many other concepts didn’t exist in ecommerce when Magento 1 was conceived and introduced. Magento 2 and its further releases were created to facilitate these and upcoming trends in ecommerce with its superior API integrability, move toward Progressive Web Apps, devotion to the cloud, and better flexibility within its codebase. If you commit to Magento, you will probably have no need to switch to a different platform ever again. Final Thoughts At the time of writing, Magento was used by 1.5% of all the CMS-based websites, which is 0.8% of all websites, according to W3Techs. The number will keep growing as Magento pours more resources into refining the latest versions of its ecommerce platform. Magento’s ecosystem has also improved significantly over the past couple of years. There were cases when the Marketplace had only one extension in a specific category, depriving store owners of choice and flexibility. Now you have a huge selection of extensions on display, both free and paid. If you already have a mature enterprise and realize that your current platform can hardly be scaled—Magento is the perfect choice for you. It has the tech backbone, infrastructure, and architecture necessary to run large B2C and B2B stores. That’s why global brands and F500 companies keep choosing Magento.
