The online retail space encompasses a vast array of eCommerce platforms and applications, each of which promises to provide your retail business with a path to eCommerce success. Some of these platforms offer a solid foundation on which to build: I’m a big fan of WooCommerce, for example. But when I need to be confident that an eCommerce store can provide everything a growing retailer needs to support their business now and into the future, I choose Magento.
Why Magento? Put simply, it offers the best combination of functionality, flexibility, and support for online selling in the modern eCommerce market. I prefer Magento for many reasons, both large and small, but what follows are the most important.
Omnichannel is The Future of eCommerce
Every eCommerce retailer should own and control their platform, but they shouldn’t have to sell only from that location. Maximizing sales means embracing other platforms, from social media to marketplaces like Amazon. In addition to being a powerful base of operations, Magento provides a huge range of integrations with other marketplaces and payment solutions. Magento makes it easier to build a true multi-channel retail business.
Magento Grows With Your Business
Many retailers launched their eCommerce business on a hosted platform like Etsy, only to be forced to migrate when the platform’s limitations get in the way of growth and innovation. Magento is intuitive enough to work well for a small eCommerce startup, but it is capable of scaling to support eCommerce stores with thousands of products and hundreds of thousands of visits a day.
Magento is Open Source
Proprietary eCommerce solutions implement one vision of what an online store should look like and the capabilities it should have. Magento is designed for the general case, but it is easily modified by retailers who need something different. Because Magento is open source, retailers can shape their store to the needs of their business, rather than having to shape their business to the limitations of the platform.
Magento offers a great mobile experience out of the box
Mobile eCommerce is the preferred way to shop in many parts of the world. Magento provides responsive themes and a responsive administration interface, giving shoppers a great experience on all their devices and allowing merchants to run their store from any device or location.
Magento Marketplace
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Magento Marketplace is a curated collection of extensions that retailers can use to find secure and trustworthy modules to enhance and modify Magento stores. Because Magento is open source and enormously popular, there is a huge range of extensions for merchants to choose from. The marketplace gives retailers the flexibility they need to sell any product and to market and manage any store.
Although there are many other eCommerce options, Magento remains the most powerful and flexible eCommerce application.
About The Author:
About Graeme Caldwell — Graeme works as an inbound marketer for Nexcess, a leading provider of Magento and WordPress hosting. Follow Nexcess on Twitter at @nexcess, Like them on Facebook