Magento is an eCommerce platform powered by Adobe. It’s among the top 3 eCommerce solutions in the world. If you are planning to sell online or looking for a better solution than what you currently have, this article will help you understand the benefits of Magento and how it could be suitable for your business. This article will also highlight a few rich features that Magento offers, and how they can revolutionise the way you do business. We’ll also address a few misconceptions about Magento.

1. Open source solution

Magento is an open-source solution and is free to download and use. They have commercial and enterprise versions as well called Magento Commerce & Magento Commerce Cloud. The Magento Source code is not only customisable, it can be enhanced through integrations and extensions to fulfil existing or future business demands. No matter how fast your business grows and how complex your processes and products become, Magento can grow with you and handle that complexity. For other platforms, it will get to a point where you have to migrate to another platform. That's why 70 out of the top 500 retail giants are using Magento.

The first misconception about Magento is that it's expensive. It is true that Magento has an initial investment cost, and it traditionally takes longer to launch a Magento website. However, once you compare Magento with other eCommerce solutions that charge monthly fees and transactional costs, Magento becomes price compelling. Magento generally has a lower maintenance cost. When you consider the value for money, Magento wins the comparison because of the robust features it offers compared to alternatives.

2. All in one eCommerce solution

Magento has put some serious thoughts into complex retail scenarios, and both their free and commercial versions have extensive rich features. It’s not just an online store you get with Magento, its extensions and integrations that allow you to create a truly omnichannel ecosystem

Magento 2 Open Source provides you with the following features:

1. Marketing sales and conversion tools
2. Search engine optimisation
3. Product and site management
4. Catalogue Management
5. Site Search
6. Integrated checkout payment and shipping
7. Order management
8. Customer accounts and support
9. Global selling
10. Businesses Intelligence
11. Mobile optimized shopping

3. Complex products and product management

Product management can improve conversions and increase cart value. Magento allows you to sell 6 types of products on your e-commerce store and offers you product management features and tools that can enhance the customer experience to increase sales. With Magento product management:

1. You get to sell simple products, configurable products, virtual products, group products, bundle products and downloadable products.
2. Inventory data can be synced and managed and prompt notifications will make sure to keep optimum inventory levels. And in case you are out of stock, you get to customise out of stock messages and allow customers to place backorders.
3. When you upload product images they can be automatically resized according to the aspect ratio.
4. Add unlimited product attributes for customers to select from, and attribute sets can be saved for future product uploads
5. Product pricing can be managed as special offers, tired prices and group prices.
6. You can allow customers to personalise their purchases and gift packaging online using rich text and image uploads.

4. Opportunities for international expansions

Most eCommerce solutions have failed to capture the complexity of international shipping or global selling. It's safe to say that Magento is the domain expert here. With Magento, you can not only sell globally, you can customise the user experience according to the country or region.

1. You can localise your product content with local currency and tax rates. For example, you can offer real-time VAT calculations for EU through VAT ID validation
2. Content can be translated into native languages and Magento even supports right to left text arrangement.
3. Customers can access real-time shipping rates from multiple couriers
4. You can Integrate local payment options.

5. Multiple storefronts with a single Magento instance

When a business expands, you will need to consider having different websites for different brands, categories or customer groups. When this happens, you need to make sure that your eCommerce admin panel allows you to manage multiple shopfronts without complexity and extra costs. But with most eCommerce solutions, they only allow one storefront with a single instance. It's not just the extra cost, image the hassle of logging into 4 different admin panels to manage 4 brands. Where Magento:

1. Allows you to control multiple websites and stores with a single Magento instance. You get to control each store through a single integrated admin panel.
2. You get to manage both your retail and wholesale customers based on location, customer group and product type.
3. Magento CMS allows you to create personalised content in a user-friendly environment and this allows you to personalise content for different customer groups.

6. Marketing, Sales and Conversion Tools

When using Magento, it’s easier to build a conversion-driven architecture on your website. Also, your marketing and sales channels can be easily integrated and managed through your Magento admin panel. There are intelligent automation rules that you can apply to fulfil your operational tasks faster and save time.

1. You can customise product pages to upsell and cross-sell by adding related products.
2. You can manage personalised email campaigns to convert abandoned carts.
3. Feature new arrivals, products on offer and recently viewed items in a personalised manner.
4. Run coupon campaigns for a specific product, customer group or a shop and integrate that campaign for offline purchases and you can get real-time data of your coupon usage.
5. Add share tabs to your products to be shared on social media.
6. Optimise product details access multiple sales channels and manage them through a single backend.

7. Customer relationship management

Ecommerce is not only about selling, it’s about retaining and reselling. Retaining customers are important for a retailer as their cart volume is ~67% higher than a new customer on average. Magento has extensive out of the box tools to offer a customer-centric retail experience.You can even integrate your own CRM solution with your Magento store. Magento allows:

1. Your customers get access to create feature-rich customer accounts where they can manage their shopping experience through comprehensive dashboards;
1. Create and save multiple billing and shipping addresses.
2. Create wish lists and even share them in social media.
3. Track their orders and manage reviews through their account.
4. Create and save shopping carts and card details for instore purchases.
5. Spacial personalisations for gifting.
2. Makes customer service easier with automated emails for order status and account updates and customer care officers can view, edit or even create orders according to customer requests.
3. You can automate customer queries and order fulfilment through integrations such as Facebook Live Chat.

8. User-friendly admin panel

Magento CMS or the admin panel is well designed to create a frictionless user experience for its users. Even though it requires coding skills to build a Magento site, that site can be managed without any coding knowledge through the admin panel. More importantly, you get to integrate your sales and marketing channels into a single admin panel and manage multiple instances at once.

It's user friendly to an extent that you can;

1. Manage multiple websites through a single admin panel.
2. Bulk import product data, catalogue data and customer data.
3. Create multiple admin accounts, assign roles and control access.
4. URL customisation and manage metadata for SEO.
5. rewrite and manage search results.

9. Business Intelligence

While other eCommerce platforms charge extra for insightful data, Magento provides real-time insightful dashboards for data visualisation and report building tools for you to create custom reports. You can integrate reporting tools like Google Analytics easily and in the long run, you can even invest in AI-powered intelligence tools like Adobe sense that can understand your customer behaviour in real-time and forecasts their future behaviour. The following are some useful reports that are freely available to help decision making.

1. Sales and Tax reports.
2. Abandoned shopping cart report.
3. Search terms and tags reports.
4. Most viewed products report.
5. Best selling products report.
6. Product review reports.
7. Sock management reports.
8. Coupon usage reports.

10. Community support and magento marketplace

Adobe maintains a database of technical resources such as Magento help centre, Magento developer docs, Magento tech resources and Magento forum to support the developer community.

A common misconception about Magento is that you have to invest in the commercial version to get the most out of it. But the truth is, the target market of Magento eCommerce solutions are the retailers who make on average gross sales revenue of $250K+. In other words, Magento open source can handle all your business demands.

It's no doubt that Magento helps retailers grow their business. If you want to further understand whether Magento is a good fit for your business, contact us. Maytech can work with you to understand your business demands and help you to determine if Magento is the right solution for your business.