In a world where everything is digitized, it’s nearly impossible to find a small — or large — business without an online presence. If you’re selling a product, your business has no hope of succeeding without an online store and strong digital presence. People spend most of their time online and it’s imperative that you target them with your product in the digital world. It isn’t as simple as just creating an e-commerce platform for your business. You first need to find the right platform for that, a place where you can guarantee maximum results. Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms out there and it’s used by thousands of businesses as their main platform. But is Magento the best choice for your business?
What is Magento?
Magento is an open source e-commerce platform where businesses can establish their own online store and start dealing with clients. This basically means that any business could get their hands on the interface of Magento and tweak it all they want to suit their business, which is a great edge this platform has over its competitors. Anyone can access its coding and adjust it to their liking.
The pros
Other than the fact that it’s an open source platform, Magento does in fact have several other things going for it. You can easily expand to other locations, sites, and currencies through Magento, and the scalability options through this platform are astonishing. Magento also has excellent analytics, which your business will need if it has any hope of growing. The platform also gives the options of reaching shoppers through email, mobile, marketplaces, and several other places that ensure maximum reach and exposure that any online store needs.
Another very cool feature about Magento is the fact that it’s quite easily customizable. The menus are easily adjusted to suit different stores and businesses, and it even comes with multiple language options! You could easily expand your campaigns on an international scale and to different countries.
Magento is also renowned for strict adherence to SEO regulations, which allows your store to get the reach it requires in order to become successful. They do this by allowing the use of friendly URLs and automating the Google Site Map.
Last but not least, when it comes to payment, Magento is one of the best platforms online in this department. If you want your store to be any kind of hit, payment is one arena you want to be as comfortable and as user-friendly as possible. People are easily turned off when they find that payment options are not smooth to use. Through Magento, you can receive payments from all around the world in a safe and quick manner that will not displease customers.
The cons
While Magento has its fair share of pros, it’s definitely not without fault. All these services don’t exactly come cheap, and if your business is just getting started, then you might want to make sure that you can cover the cost of a platform like this. In this blog post, the question how much does Magento cost is thoroughly answered among some other very important points that you will need to learn before getting started with the e-commerce platform. You’ll find all details you need to know, from pricing to develop analysis and much more, as well as comparisons between Magento and similar platforms, so you can make up your mind on which works best for your business.
Another point you’ll want to consider before using Magento is the fact that it’s open source. While we did say it’s definitely a good thing that it is, it can also be a bad thing. An open source platform means that it’s not exactly geared at the novices out there and people who are not well versed in the workings of web design and optimization. It’s basically a platform designed by developers for developers, so it’s not what you might call user-friendly. While Magento does offer a ton of features and options, if you don’t have hands-on technical expertise with all e-commerce technicalities, what good would those features do for you?
Is Magento the best option for you?
That is the one-million-dollar question. Truth is, Magento is definitely not for everyone. The platform has a million options and its best angle is the fact that you can customize it however you want. If you have a team capable enough to do it, you can have an online store as you envisioned it. But that’s not always as easy as it seems. Money aside, developing the perfect online store takes more than just the technical experience; it takes time and effort. The process is quite complicated and there’s no way it can get done in a couple of days. Even once it’s done, the developer can never stop and it has to be continuous to ensure that your store can thrive in the future by adding new features and constant maintenance.
What you need to ask yourself is if you have the time and experience to go through a platform as dynamic and complex as Magento. Based on your answer, you’ll know whether you can start using Magento or if your interests best lie elsewhere.
If you examine all the pros and cons, and take a good look at the level of complexity that Magento entails, you’ll come to the conclusion that it is not the ideal platform for an up-and-coming startup or small businesses and stores that are on their way to launch. Magento is perfect for established stores looking to beef up their clientele base and expand their businesses on a global scale. It also works for middle-sized businesses that have a team of people with enough technical experience to move to a platform like Magento and improve, or even redo, their entire online store. The point is that these established businesses already have a client base and they have clear targets and audiences in mind, unlike a store that is about to launch where things are a bit vague and everyone’s still finding their bearings.
