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Pros and Cons of Magento ecommerce

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In the modern fast-growing business environment, many small and big companies have their own multifunctional websites. Building a consistent online presence is necessary for your business as well. However, choosing one or another CMS for a website can be a big deal. Many of them offer convincing advantages with real examples of great, innovative web resources. You need to choose the best one that can meet all you needs and requirements. Today, we’re going to talk about Magento ecommerce platform, its main features, and its pros & cons. Let’s start from the beginning!

The history of Magento

Magento CMS was released in March 2008. As of writing, this CMS has won a place as one of the most popular content management systems for online stores in the world. It should be noted that since 2011 the company that developed this CMS is owned by the American company eBay. Therefore Magento CMS is used as  a platform for their online stores, and is used by companies such as Olympus, 20th Century Fox, Time Out and many others. Currently more than 250,000 sites around the world run on this platform.

Magento technical features

Magento CMS has open source code. It is written in PHP (it uses the Zend Framework) and uses MySQL as the database. This significantly saves the resources of the owner of the online store.

After installation, the admin panel of the Magento website looks like this:

admin panel of the Magento

And Magento Ecommerce websites can look, for example, like this:

grenson websitebulgari websitequinny website

The Pros of Magento

There are many reasons why Magento CMS is considered an ideal platform for online stores.

  • Its main strength is the abundance of built-in functions: currency, languages, discounts and coupons, reports and much more. In addition to the built-in functionality, Magento CMS has many modules (or extensions) and various templates. Also, we should not forget that this is a scalable and extensible platform.
  • Magento CMS was conceived as a flexible and multifaceted platform. It's hardly possible to think of a more suitable CMS for an online store. The only possible competition comes from WordPress with the WooCommerce plug-in and Drupal. However WordPress is more a blog platform, and Drupal is difficult to configure. Their built-in capabilities cannot be compared with Magento CMS.
  • Magento CMS makes it possible to create several online stores at once and then manage them from a common center with one administrative panel, which is certainly very convenient. This is a big plus and encourages many online store owners to choose this particular platform.
  • We will not dwell in detail on the standard functions for this kind of platform, like the ability to create product cards with detailed descriptions, characteristics, photos and similar products.
  • In Magento CMS it is easy to work with prices — you can reduce the cost of your goods for a set time, give discounts to regular customers, arrange a promotion and more. In other words, it has everything to increase the popularity of the store, as well as increase sales.
  • There is also a convenient management system in Magento CMS, which allows you to distinguish access rights in the administrative panel for different people: managers, accountants, programmers and others.
  • Many functions are available to users in the online store on the Magento CMS platform. For example, they can write feedback on products and estimate them.
  • For promotion in search engines there is an opportunity to optimize the page of each product. Moreover, Magento CMS allows you to create an XML-map of the site, which will contain links to all available pages of the online store. This map is necessary for search engine robots to correctly index the resource.
  • It should be noted that CMS Magento has access to HTML and PHP code, so there are many options for configuration.
  • This platform will please those who like to closely monitor the actions of both their products and customers, as it allows you to write various reports: what happens to the goods (their movement, how many are left, etc.), what attracts visitors to the pages, which page is the last they read before they leave, and much more.
  • One of the features of Magento CMS is that this platform is quite demanding for hosting, that is, it requires a high-quality hosting provider — for example, Drupalharbour, where you can choose own package.

The Cons of Magento

  • While working with Magento CMS, an ordinary user can face some difficulties — for example, if they want to make a really unique design or add certain payment systems. In this case, you will have to hire third-party specialists (designers and programmers), and you should be prepared for this.
  • For a long time, many people consider that the main disadvantage of this system is the lack of an opportunity to interact with 1C: Enterprise. However, now this problem has been resolved and there is a special module with which systems can exchange data about goods, orders, etc.
  • Since this platform is demanding of resources, it makes no sense to use Magento CMS for very small online stores with several products.

Conclusion

Magento ecommerce platform is a good and qualitative CMS, which is great for creating an online store. In some ways it can be difficult for an inexperienced user, but its capabilities are much broader than other similar platforms. And if there are not certain features in the basic configuration, then you can connect additional modules — at the moment there are more than four thousand different extensions. Anyway, you should consult our seasoned professionals who will provide you with the best possible solutions. You can also follow our page on Facebook for new updates. There always a lot of useful and interesting information there!