Have your sales hit a plateau? Looking for anonline store development platform to get your eCommerce store off the ground?If yes, this insightful and detailed piece is for you. Read this until the end to make an informed decision once and for all. When it comes to eCommerce store development platforms, you’ll be spoilt for choice. However, choosing the right one that perfectly meets your unique business requirements can be a hard nut to crack, particularly if you’re a rookie in the eCommerce realm. The good news is that you don’t need to fret anymore, nor you have to scour the web endlessly for hours.
Though the market is flooded with a multitude ofoptions, Magento is one such platform that dominates over others. Since itsinitial release in 2008, this open-source eCommerce store development platform has been evolving and becoming better than ever. This may be the reason why both developers and merchants prefer Magento for eCommerce store development. In fact, many leading brands that use Magento include Tommy Hilfiger, HP, Ford, Olympus, Jaguar, Nestle Nespresso, Christian Louboutin, Asus, Burger King, Land Rover, Coca-Cola, Procter and Gamble, and many more. What’s more fascinating about Magento is that it powers over 190,000 live sites on the internet and out of them, 11,340 sites are in the top 1 million sites. Furthermore, Magento holds the potential to handle more than 155 billion USD of transactions per year. On average, merchantsthat use Magento grow 3 times faster.
If you are also planning to invest in custom Magento development to expand your eCommercereach, it is recommended to seek help from certified Magento developers. Beforeyou hire seasoned Magento developers for your online store development, you must weigh the pros and cons of this eCommerce platform. Let’s get started.
Pros of Magento eCommerce Development
1) Advanced SEO Features
Unlike proprietary platforms that don't allowusers to optimize their eStore for search engines, Magento is an SEO-friendlyeCommerce platform that comes with advanced SEO features. Using Magento, users can create search-optimized URLs, sitemaps, meta tags, meta descriptions, product descriptions, layered navigation, and add rich snippets that help you to attract a large number of organic searches. In other words, having an SEO-optimized eCommerce store not only ranks higher in organic search results but also drives an influx of traffic resulting in more leads, sales, and profits.
2) Loads at Blazing Fast Speed
Did you know? A one-second delay in page loadtime can drop conversions by 7% and reduce customer satisfaction by 16%. Also,you may end up losing 40% of customers if your website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In fact, Google andother leading search engines also favor fast-loading websites in search results and encourage merchants to build such sites.
The good news is that you won’t encounter anyspeed related issues when you choose the Magento platform for your eCommercestore development. Website built with Magento loads at blazing fast speed across all devices, which leads to a sharp increase in returning visitors, satisfied customers, brand advocacy, and more conversions. You would be surprised to know that a 0.1-second improvement in mobile site speed canimprove the conversion rate for retail sites by 8.4%. This clearly indicates that fast loading website is the need of the hour since pages that load in under 2 seconds have an average bounce rate of 9% only.
3) Easy Third-party Integrations
Magento is a feature-rich platform that offers ahost of functionalities a merchant needs to run an online store. However, ifyou want to extend the default functionality of your eCommerce store to offer a seamless shopping experience, Magento facilitates easy third-party app integrations. With the help of a Magento eCommerce development company, you can integrate a slew ofthird-party applications ranging from PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net and Sage Pay to eBay, QuickBooks, Google Shopping, Google Analytics, MailChimp, and Nosto.
4) Strong Community Support
Magento is backed by a strong community ofeCommerce developers and enthusiasts who are actively contributing to make thisplatform better than ever. As of now, there are more than 465000 members in the Magento community and 178425 posts. With every passing day, the Magento community is becoming stronger giving newbies a solid backbone of support. Next time, if you encounter any technical issue related to your Magento store or have a question to ask related to customization or development, don't forget to reach out to the community experts. Besides the strong community support,Magento also offers a wealth of self-help tools and technical resources in the form of documentation, guides, eBooks, whitepapers, blogs, events, and webinars to help you succeed in the eCommerce world.
5) Unbreachable Security
Since Magento is owned by an industry leaderAdobe, you can rest assured that the premium level of security standards hasbeen implemented. From PCI Data Security as a default standard to the secondary password prompt, login screens with Google reCAPTCHA, etc. provide your eCommerce store with utmost defense against potential site attacks, hacking activities, cybersecurity threats, and unwanted security breaches. Apart from this, you can also create a custom URL for your admin panel, use an SSL layer, and add an extra layer of protection with amazing features like two-factor authentication. This will help you keep your eCommerce store safe and protected from intruders.
Cons of Magento eCommerce Development
- High time-to-market
- Requires powerful hosting
- High development and maintenance cost
- Relatively expensive than other eCommerce platforms
Summing Up
From the above, it is clear that choosing Magentoas your eCommerce store development platform can be a wise decision. The reasonbeing is it offers more pros than cons, and that’s why businesses both large and small alike choose Magento over other eCommerce platforms. When investing in the Magento platform, it’s always recommended to partner with a professional eCommerce development company that has a team of certified Magento developers. When you hire seasoned professionals, you’ll get a feature-rich, scalable, and intuitive store that offers a delightful shopping experience to your customers resulting in more sales and profits.