Why choose Magento?
Building a new website is not a piece of cake. The first and the most important step on this long journey is deciding on a platform for the future online store. This decision will determine the website’s development path and how exactly it will function. There are plenty of platforms to choose from, but we are not the first and only ones to say that Magento is one of the most popular and largest e-commerce platforms. It is used by more than 730,000 store owners all over the world and is considered to be a significantly powerful platform offering an incomparable number of features.
Like any other platform, surely Magento has its pros and cons. We are here to find out why Magento has become so popular and how it can help you grow your online business.
Let’s start with the advantages first.
Pros
Rich in-built functionality
What else but Magento can offer such a variety of features to operate a website in the needed way? It obviously stands out from other platforms in terms of the number of in-built functionality. Even without code customizations and add-ons, Magento meets the requirements of a modern online store:
Client features and user-friendly design
Magento provides plenty of features to allow customers to effectively interact with the site: banners with announcements, wishlists and product comparison, customer accounts with order history and user information, CMS pages with contact details and store policies, etc. But how can you fit all this into one site and not make it look bulky? No one wants to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how the website works. With Magento, you can set up your site so that it is understandable even to new buyers:
- straightforward UI,
- simple catalog and menu navigation,
- effective search results,
- comprehensive product description,
- and easy checkout steps will help to save your customers’ time.
Language options
If you deliver products to different parts of the world, you should take into account the possible locations of your customers and make it as easy for them as possible to shop in your store. Magento allows admins to create several stores with different languages and currencies, which makes shopping much more convenient for foreign clients.
Promotional capabilities
It’s obvious that discounts improve customer loyalty and encourage them to buy more. Magento has a large selection of promotional features: you can create global sales or personalized deals, set special prices on individual products in the catalog or make conditional cart promotions, and collect leads to your newsletter. Above that, the Adobe Commerce provides such features as Gift Card, Store Credit, and Reward Points that extend your promotional campaign creation possibilities even further.
Omnichannel strategy
With more mobile devices within reach, mobile shopping becomes more and more popular. Phones and tablets are convenient, fast, and let you shop on the go. Therefore, it is so important to have a website that will look seamless and function correctly on devices of any size. Magento allows creating a fully mobile-friendly website due to its PWA support.
User-generated content
Before buying a new product, prospect often turn to reviews to get a trustworthy sense of how other customers liked the product and how your company treat clients. That’s what Magento’s reviews and ratings are used for.
Of course, it is only a small part of all the features Magento offers. An online shop is a complex website that also consists of components invisible or imperceptible to customers. Magento has a lot for admins too: unrivaled SEO capabilities, advanced reports, products and orders management tools, page builder, MSI functionality, import and export, user roles and permissions, and many more.
Wide choice of extensions
With Magento alone, especially the Adobe Commerce edition, you already have the opportunity to set up a fully functional online store. But if the platform doesn’t have all the features you need, you have the ability to add them. There is an almost endless choice of modules on the market, and their number is constantly growing as new trends in e-commerce emerge.
Limitless customization
Despite the wide range of extensions, it is not always possible to fully cover business needs with ready-made solutions. What is especially attractive about Magento Open Source is that it gives you a unique opportunity to modify its code to your liking. Many companies or individual developers offer customization services, so you have the full freedom to tailor the website to your needs as long as you have resources or can code yourself.
Scalability
One of the aspects store owners often overlook when choosing a platform is its capacity to process large amounts of data. Even if you've just started your business with a modest amount of products, it's worth taking care of your site's future capabilities. As business expands, the platform will need to handle large volumes of products and a continuous flow of orders with ease. This is what Magento is for sure capable of. The scalability of the platform allows processing thousands of products and transactions at once, which will definitely save you a headache after expanding your business.
Large user community
Magento is also famous for its countless sources to find an answer to any question and get help if problems occurred. Adobe itself provides comprehensive user guides that lead you through the setup processes step by step. Above that, you can find answers in the Magento Forum or simply in any other platform-devoted forum where its members share useful information.
Now, let’s move on to the disadvantages.
Cons
Too technical
It doesn’t matter how many products or orders you have — Magento Open Source is powerful enough to handle them all. It’s a highly robust platform, but it is complex, too. When it comes to small businesses, sometimes the effort involved in setting up and maintaining such a feature-rich platform may not be worth it. Unless you have enough skills in web development, it will be pretty difficult to fine-tune a site on Magento and, moreover, customize its code or extend with ready solutions.
High hosting costs
Considering the complexity and performance needs of a Magento site, it has some requirements in regard to hosting. You better use VPS, cloud, or dedicated servers, which may also be difficult to set up for beginners without a team of professionals.
Expensive customizations
As stated in the previous points, Magento might be hard to set up for store owners new to the e-commerce world. If you are not a developer yourself, you will have to hire a professional to do the setup, customizations, and other code-related jobs for you. This will cost you additional expenses and time even for Magento Open Source, although it is free to install.
Conclusion
Magento is considered most suitable for those companies that are firmly established, have a regular flow of customers and, if necessary, can afford additional costs of installing, configuring, and customizing the site. But there's always a payoff: Magento is a hugely powerful e-commerce platform with an endless variety of settings due to agile customizations as well as in-built features for boosting sales and attracting customers.
Choosing a platform your website will be built on may not always be a fast and easy process. You should compare all the strengths and weaknesses of each platform. But which ones are crucial for you? It’s up to you to decide.