Magento is an ecommerce platform built on open source technology which provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system, as well as control over the look, content and functionality of their online store. [1] Magento offers powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools.

Common Places uses the community-based Magento product for our ecommerce clients. Magento's ability to scale allows shops with only a few products and simple needs to easily expand to tens of thousands of products and complex custom behavior without changing platforms. It offers a variety of plug-ins and themes which can easily enhance a customer's experience. There are a lot of aspects to the online store which need to be configured, and how well that is accomplished is often dependent on business acumen. When it comes to custom functionality, however, that is where more complex programming is required.

Magento is designed to be utilized as an application by someone who isn't a developer. The Magento community is extremely large and very helpful. However, at some point the average person is going to hit a wall. Figure 1 shows the Magento e-commerce Platform.

Figure 1: Magento e-commerce Platform

Benefits of using Magento

Flexible Content Management System

When compared to other platforms, Magento is excellent for eCommerce. [2] The platform has a profound and adaptable CMS. It works well for every store, whether they plan to pitch 10 items or 10 million items. Irrespective of the size and kind of e-commerce website you have, building a site using Magento is quite easy.

Extensions

Magento has the largest selection of high-quality extensions in the world. Their extensions provide the ability to extend the features of a Magento store at any time. For instance, when you start an online store, you may not require a live chat extension; however, this can be added later, as and when the traffic grows. The Magento Marketplace has extensions provided in different categories, like for marketing, payments, customer support, accounting, sales, analytics, shipping, as well as for site optimization.

Highly Secure

In contrast to a few other eCommerce solutions that are available on the market, Magento is compliant with PA-DSS. This indicates that Magento follows not just the globally accepted security standards, they also follow the 14 vital protection criteria as well. Large businesses that sell products to customers on a global level are more worried about the safety of the payments they collect online; and they find that Magento meets their needs perfectly. It is a good choice for those firms who wish to provide their customers with secure payments options.

E-Commerce Store Loads Faster

Magento aims to create some of the fastest eCommerce worldwide. According to recent stats from Google, the speed related to the loading of web pages is crucial because they found that more than 50% of users abandon a page that does not load fast. Magento’s heavy-duty platform enables administrators to keep page load time at a bare minimum, even when websites receive a high volume of traffic.

Magento has the ability to host many websites and control them from a single back-end admin. This is one of the many features that make Magento popular. This particular feature has made Magento the best eCommerce CMS platform for business owners who operate many online stores and pages.

Customized Integrations

By permitting integration from 3rd parties, Magento provides more choices to customize an online store. This is an important advantage of the eCommerce platform that Magento offers. Magento enables every single store to be customized. Some basic 3rd party integrations, consisting of main web applications, additional payment gateways, etc.

Mobile Friendly

We are living in a mobile era and a large chunk of online shopping takes place on mobile devices. Magento offers the opportunity for websites to have a responsive design so that they can provide a seamless user experiences across different screens. The Cross-platform compatibility, cross-browser compatibility, and device form agnostic capability of Magento makes it fit for the new era.

References:

1. https://www.commonplaces.com/blog/what-is-magento/
2. https://www.qualdev.com/why-is-magento-best-option-for-your-e-commerce-store/

Cite this article:

Vinotha D (2021), The Open-Source E-commerce Platform: Magento, AnaTechmaz, pp. 9