Today, the eCommerce industry has turned into a rapidly growing market. It is estimated to grow at a rate of 6% YoY until 2024 and reach USD 16,215 billion by 2027. This fast-paced market is highly driven by the rising penetration of smartphones and the internet and the rise in the adoption of omnichannel business models in retail.
The pandemic is also a significant factor for the sudden growth of this industry. According to industry experts, the pandemic has accelerated online shopping by as much as five years. This has led retailers worldwide to sell online – scaling and expanding their businesses to reach new markets and serve customers from across the globe.
But, as the industry is exploding, there are specific challenges retailers must contend with, such as:
- Building customer loyalty and improving user experience
- Handling data and security breaches
- Dealing with fierce competition, price hikes, and economic uncertainty
- Inefficient policies for returns, refunds, and order fulfillment
- Lack of SEO knowledge for drawing relevant traffic to the online store
- Converting shoppers into paying customers
While many eCommerce platforms are available in the market, there are a handful of reasons why Magento has been the most popular and how adopting it can help solve the above challenges. But before we dive deep into the unique features and values of Magento, let us have a quick understanding of the platform itself.
What is Magento?
Magento is one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms for building customized websites and shopping portals. It helps enterprise store owners manage high sales and customer volume and handle heavy website traffic while offering a high conversion rate.
The platform offers a high degree of customization and exceptional flexibility with advanced features such as various tools for managing an XML website, CMS for static pages, rewriting URLs, integrated image optimization, the grouping of products, multi-store facilities, email list, and SEO related modules. Moreover, it has a user-friendly interface with responsive design, multiple deployment choices, and seamless integration with third-party modules, which aid in creating an enjoyable shopping experience for users.
Headless Commerce- The digital differentiator
Modern shoppers are empowered by technology and look for seamless digital shopping experiences tailored to their specific needs and interests. In addition, they expect loyalty rewards, same-day delivery, free shipping, social engagement, and more. This shift in consumer behavior has created a demand for novel approaches in Magento.
Headless commerce decouples the front-end of the eCommerce store from its backend. This means the content presentation layer is separated from the functional and business logic layer, allowing eCommerce companies to deploy new customer experiences across various channels. Headless commerce is agile, flexible, and customizable and helps in creating unique and engaging shopping experiences.
Adobe Commerce & Adobe Commerce Cloud
Adobe Commerce is an eCommerce product developed and maintained by Adobe and powered by Magento. It allows businesses to create engaging and unique shopping experiences with striking features for store fulfillment, page builder, marketplace, user experience, product recommendations, customer segmentation, personalization, etc. It offers an easy-to-use interface to create and launch content and provide a personalized shopping experience without the support of a developer. It can serve both B2B and B2C customers within a single platform and easily integrates with existing backend systems. It also offers numerous extensions and themes to customize your eCommerce storefront. Additionally, its business intelligence feature allows you to track and monitor your data and turn the insights into striking visualizations for better decision-making.
Adobe Commerce Cloud is an automated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) built on a redundant AWS-based cloud hosting platform. It is a highly scalable and customizable solution including all the Magento Commerce on-premise features.
Top Reasons for Choosing Magento for eCommerce
If you’re looking for a new e-commerce website, the first thing you need to decide is whether you’ll use a pre-made plug-and-play website or a custom solution. There are ready-to-use e-commerce solutions available such as Shopify and WooCommerce, that offer numerous advantages, but they do not fit the needs of every business. Custom e-commerce solutions, on the other hand, require a more significant time investment but offer better scalability, flexibility, and control. Here are some unique features and functionalities of Magento that make it stand out from the rest of the available solutions for eCommerce development.
Open Source
Magento is an open-source platform that gives the developers and site owners access to the source code, thereby offering complete flexibility and freedom to customize the code to fit specific business requirements. In addition, the Magento Open Source is free and adaptable, so all that the developers need is some extra time and server space to build the website. With Magento Open Source, you can create your site exactly as you envisioned if you have the right technical skills. It also gives you control over the logic flow and design on each site page and access to a library of modules to develop new features and functionalities for your Magento store.
Highly scalable
Magento is a scalable solution, making it suitable for both small and large businesses. It can handle growth and scale accordingly. If you are a new business, you can start with a relatively basic installation and upgrade features with the proper hardware and configuration as your business grows. For instance, if your site traffic increases suddenly, you can easily manage the load by adding more backup servers. This will save your online store from crashing and improve page loading, thereby saving a lot of business for your retail store.
One site set up for multiple stores
Whether you have a specific product catalog that serves multiple websites or has more than one brand on the same website, you can use Magento to maintain all your products, orders, and settings in a single site setup. It supports multiple store setups from the same backend, which allows you to manage multiple stores from the same admin dashboard. The inventory and order management feature of Magento will enable businesses with various brands, sites, stores, and warehouses to create seamless cross-channel experiences. It also allows developers to extend and expand the platform to new product categories and customize it based on their brand and target market, saving a lot of money, effort, and time for retail players.
Third-party integrations
Magento allows you to integrate with various third-party services such as web applications, payment gateways, shipping, transportation and order tracking systems, and databases. Some of the popular integrations used by retail stores include PayPal, eBay, Google Shopping, MailChimp, QuickBooks, etc. It also offers in-built Google tools such as Google Analytics, Google Base, and Google Checkout to help you monitor site traffic, analyze website performance, and stay well-informed of the latest trends in Magento eCommerce.
Product Recommendations
Product recommendations are a great marketing tool to improve customer engagement, boost conversions, and increase revenue. Powered by Adobe Sensei, Magento’s product recommendation uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning algorithms to analyze visitor data and suggest relevant products. These recommendations appear on the storefront in the form of “Similar Products” and “Customers who viewed this also viewed” and create highly relevant and personalized shopping experiences.
Live Search feature
Magento also offers an AI-powered tool for intelligent and fast live searches. Also powered by Adobe Sensei, this tool uses real-time data to deliver automated personalized search results for shoppers to find what they want quickly. It also offers a flexible developer framework that eliminates tedious merchant tasks and provides search results with accuracy and speed.
Flexible content and extensions
One of the main reasons for Magento’s popularity amongst developers is its flexibility in content systems and extensions, allowing them to develop the site the way they want. It provides you with a flexible content management system to manage changes in content based on language, culture, laws, currency, etc., for global markets and customize your store for user-friendliness. Moreover, it also allows you to customize your online store with high-quality add-ons, extensions, modules, plugins, and apps designed to meet specific business needs. Adding these extensions helps enhance your site, drive more traffic, boost conversion and sales, report and analytics, and optimize the customer experience. Both free and paid extensions are available, which you can leverage based on your requirements and budget.
SEO friendly
Magento comes with in-built SEO features that help your eCommerce store rank in the search engines and reach your target customers easily. It includes an SEO-friendly URL structure, meta tags and descriptions for products, categories, and content pages, auto-generated sitemaps, positioning layer, and popular search terms, which improve the on-page SEO of your website.
Mobile friendly
As per a recent report, three out of four consumers prefer buying from their smartphones because it saves time. Catering to mobile-savvy customers is therefore inevitable for the success of your eCommerce business. Magento supports shopping experiences on mobile devices with pre-integrated HTML5 technology. In addition, it offers device-specific media capabilities, user-friendly search and results, display, pinch, multi-touch, scaling images, zoom, and easy swipe options for product images. All these features help in quickly creating a storefront optimized for a seamless mobile shopping experience.
Security features
Magento provides advanced security features to protect your eCommerce store from unexpected breaches and site attacks. It uses CAPTCHA and PCI Data Security for protection, which makes the site difficult to hack. As a result, it is more secure for both customers and sellers than sites built using Core PHP or WordPress.
Multi-lingual support
Businesses and merchants catering to multiple markets across the globe should offer their website in various languages to make it easily accessible to their customer base. Magento allows you to build multi-lingual sites, making it the go-to platform for businesses wanting to expand to new markets. Consequently, it also supports multi-currency transactions, making it ideal for building your eCommerce store.
Magento is a sure-shot option for companies looking to implement many distinctive features to their online store. The scalability and customization capacity of Magento makes it stand out from the plug-and-play options available. Moreover, all these powerful features and benefits play a huge role in improving your eCommerce business processes which will, in turn, result in better ROI.
Wrapping Up
Apart from those discussed here, other valuable features for order management, customer service, analytics and reporting, product browsing, checkout, payment and shipping, and marketing and promotions play a crucial role in improving your eCommerce business. The quick load time, improved shopping experience, high-level technical architecture, and better testing and reporting capabilities make Magento a powerhouse for eCommerce.
At Experion, we have a team of Magento certified experts offering Magento design, development, maintenance, and support services. Our Magento portfolio includes e-commerce consulting/development, architecture design, Magento migration, re-platforming, roadmap support, usability/UI re-engineering, and headless eCommerce.
To know more about our Magento services or to get help with building a Magento store for your business, write to us at sales@blackrockdxb.com.