Magento is among the most credible CMS choices for eCommerce development. It provides every feature topical to the needs of leading eCommerce businesses.  More than 250,000 eCommerce enterprises across the world are using Magento as their preferred platform.

Magento is considered an ideal choice for those planning a serious, customer-oriented, and fully-fledged eCommerce platform. It is considerably more efficient and effective than many of its contenders in the market.

The platform is packaged with upgraded features and functionalities for the eCommerce development community. With its powering cloud, it has sustained its place in the world’s top-most eCommerce platforms.

From theme customization to interactive module development, Magento has been the one-stop key to transform any eCommerce idea into reality. Acquisition of Magento in Adobe Experience Cloud led to a new sense of transition where it became easier to develop elegant eCommerce apps.

What Makes Magento the Best Choice for eCommerce Development

There are plenty of reasons for choosing Magento over any other platform. The most crucial and one-line reason for them is, Magento is dedicatedly developed for eCommerce platforms. It has every feature, plugin, tool, functionality, and many other things to help you create a competitive and effective eCommerce portal.

Let’s have a look at some of the significant offerings of Magento making it stand out from its contenders.

1. Easy Customization

Magento provides specialized customization features that allow developers to create interactive eCommerce solutions easily. It indulges in fundamental features for template tuning. It has simplistic drag and drop tools that engage in smooth development. It allows developers to customize and enhance the existing Magento template to a more classified form.

Developers can customize and add new logos, images, banners, and many other things inside the existed template. Such tools have been proven remarkably useful for enterprises of all scales including startups and well-established eCommerce companies.

Moreover, Magento store enables eCommerce website development services providers to indulge in a greater degree of user experience through its applications.

2. Streamlined Pricing and Promotions

With many new upgrades, it has become more efficient and feasible to manage pricing and promotions on your eCommerce platforms through Magento. These features are helping not only developers but also facilitating businesses by engaging an interactive way to outcast promotions and gain more sales.

Developers want to indulge in lucrative pricing and promotion features while offering Magento eCommerce development services. The inclusion of precise and specific pricing and promotion protocols has led businesses to indulge in good conversion rates right from the beginning of their journey as an enterprise.

So you can say that Magento helps the eCommerce business to leverage the best configuration conditions on pricing and promotions.

3. Cost-Effective & Competitive

To be honest, eCommerce development with Magento can be costlier than on WordPress. However, if we count it on efficiency, Magento indulges in a fully-fledged platform for creating go-to applications for the end-users.

If you ask an eCommerce website development company to choose a platform that can help you create a competitive eCommerce portal, there is a staggering possibility that they would prefer using Magento over any other CMS or framework.

Magento offers a range of additions that allow developers to create solutions of their choice of features and budget. Thus, it is up to the business professionals how to cope with the needs of the Magento development company they hire.

4. Versatile Editions

Magento is probably the most versatile eCommerce development platform. There are different editions of the platforms available categorized on the basis of their applications.

Magento Open Source or Magento Community Edition is a premier edition of the eCommerce platform that focuses on providing its free and open-source access. The primary adoption of this edition is by small-scale businesses to leverage Magento’s high-efficiency features at minimized costs. However, this edition provides access to basic features, developers can extend them to advanced features.

Magento Commerce or Magento Enterprise Edition is a superior edition developed considering the needs of medium to large-scale enterprises. This edition consists of advanced features such as hosting or integration of SaaS services. There are features dedicated to fulfilling the maintenance, testing, configuration, and troubleshooting needs of the eCommerce platforms.

5. Inclusion of Large Inventories

6. Fast Checkout

7. Third-Party Services Integration

Magento is flexible with third-party integration services. They can also adopt custom development and integration of plugins. Such functionality allows developers to engage in advanced features to their eCommerce application and indulge in a rich user experience.

Developers can integrate third-party APIs for payment, SMS and shipping, CMS, CRM, ERP, and many other advanced functionalities. It allows businesses to create effective shopping apps for the customers.

Such integrations help developers engage in maximum automation to the eCommerce apps. They make the eCommerce development more simplified, time-efficient, and cost-effective.

8. Cross-Browser Compatibilities

To engage in maximum usage of your eCommerce applications over different browsing environments, Magento allows developers to utilize browser capabilities detection features. They can use customize the compatibility settings.

The code developed using Magento are highly compatible to all platform and browsing requirements. Thus, your users can use eCommerce applications across all browsers.

9. Advanced Testing Facility

Magento’s testing have adopted revolutionary changes to the eCommerce market for responsive, adaptive, functional, unit and other types of testing. It provides the Magento Functional Testing Framework for performing end-to-end functional tests on your eCommerce application. It allows quality testers run highly readable, customizable, modular and manageable test cases.

Moreover, there are more advanced features to test code quality. Third-party testing platforms such as PhpCs, PHPStan and PhpMd can also be integrated to engage in interactive and precise quality analysis.

10. Community Support

There is large community hub which Magento developers or business professionals can utilize. There are developers, experts, and other professionals raising and answering queries. The community forum has been segragated in three main categories i.e. Magento Contributors for developers, Magento Masters for experts or contributors and Innovations Lab for futuristic upgradations.

Popular Companies Using Magento

• Ford
• Omega Watches
• Christian Louboutin
• Bulgari
• Liverpool FC
• Pepe Jeans
• Land Rover
• Harvey Nichols

Conclusion

Magento is considerably the best choice for creating reliable, effective, efficient, and future-oriented eCommerce solutions. Despite its many competitors in the market, it has set up its own unique image and significance.

With its evolving features, it tends to keep establishing its identity through sustainable, versatile and developer-friendly offerings.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the eCommerce industry is rapidly booming, now more than ever. There are an estimated 12 million to 24 million eCommerce stores worldwide, but only 1 million of them make more than $1000 a year!

Hence, there is plenty of room for growth for eCommerce stores around the world. If you want your eCommerce store to stand out amongst the millions of other stores, you should follow certain best practices that will increase the chances of your eCommerce store’s success.

Let’s look at some of the best practices you must follow and the mistakes that you must avoid to create a successful eCommerce site.

1. Simplify your Payment Process

Smooth payment experience is the primary expectation of most buyers. How many times have you decided not to purchase from a website simply because you were not sure of their payment process? Plenty of times, I’m sure! You can simplify your eCommerce store’s payment experience by:

• Offer risk-free payment options such as money-back guarantee and easy return policies.
• Make your payment process hassle-free by reducing the number of steps and increasing the number of payment options.
• Disclose any additional costs upfront. Try not to add additional charges such as taxes or duties during the last step of the checkout process.
• Ensure that your payment pages load quickly (preferably within 3 seconds) to stop your users from getting frustrated.
• And most importantly, ensure that your website and payment gateway are highly secure. Use an SSL certificate or Wildcard SSL(for Unlimited Subdomain) for your website and take all necessary security measures that safeguard customer data privacy.

2. Prioritize SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) enables your website to rank on the 1st page of Google’s organic search results. This can be highly beneficial for your eCommerce store as around 49% of buyers start their journey from a search engine.

Perform keyword research for your website, and optimize your product pages and content for these keywords. Start blogging on your eCommerce website and implement content marketing strategies for your content. This will be super-useful for your website’s SEO as it will bring in a lot of traffic for the initial stages of your sales funnel. Also, build backlinks for your site using strategies such as guest posting, email outreach, broken link building, etc.

3. Adhere to Web Accessibility Guidelines

Around 20% of Americans are known to be disabled in some way. This means that 1 out of 5 visitors will leave your website if they encounter accessibility issues. Moreover, numerous eCommerce sites, both small and large, have been filed with web accessibility lawsuits because of non-compliance with ADA regulations. Hence, it is imperative that you adhere to web accessibility guidelines for your eCommerce site.

The frequently changing accessibility guidelines and numerous product pages on your website can make it challenging to keep up with web accessibility compliance at all times.

An AI-based automatic web accessibility software can be the best solution to save your company from expensive web accessibility lawsuits. On top of that, it’ll open your store to more revenues from web surfers that could not purchase prior to making your website accessible.

Such tools will scan your website for accessibility issues and fix them automatically.

4. Build an Email List

Did you know that effective email marketing can yield up to 4400% ROI for your eCommerce business? Many eCommerce companies overlook the possibility of email marketing. You can avoid this by taking proactive steps today.

• Collect email lists and build a base of email subscribers.
• Do not always send promotional emails. Instead, share your blog posts or other valuable content that add value to your consumers also once in a while.
• Offer special discounts to your email subscribers.
• Always personalize your emails. Segment your subscribers into different lists based on demographics, buyer journey stage, interests, etc. and send personalized emails to each list. This will rapidly improve your conversion rates.

5. Offer Easy Navigation and Searchability

Easy navigation around the website and ease of searchability are no brainers for eCommerce websites. Complicating these will definitely leave your visitors frustrated and result in increased bounce rates.

Hence, offer intuitive navigation options such that all the pages on your website can be accessed within 2 to 3 link clicks. Offer enhanced searchability using features like auto-complete.

6. Improve your Website’s Speed and Performance

Website speed is super-important for your eCommerce store. Ensure that all your web pages load within 3 seconds or less. Implement strategies such as page caching, browser caching, JS and CSS minification, and lazy load for images to improve your website’s speed and performance. You can check the speed of your website using Google’s Page Speed Insights tool.

7. Use High-Quality Product Images and Videos

Low quality, blurry, and inaccurate images are a huge no for modern-day eCommerce sites. In fact, studies show that 33% of buyers prefer to view multiple photos and 60% prefer a 360-degree vision of products before making a purchase!

Provide top-notch experience to your website visitors by adding high resolution and accurate images to all your products. You can take your UX up a notch by adding demo videos for your products.

8. Add Comprehensive and Accurate Product Descriptions

Accuracy of product descriptions is again crucial for improving your eCommerce sales. When potential customers land on a not-so-popular eCommerce site, they are likely to have a lot of objections before making any buying decisions. Providing thorough and accurate product descriptions can remove such objections to a great extent.

Ensure that you include all the specifications and features of products. Also, ensure that the information you provide is 100% accurate.

9. Ensure that your Site is Mobile-Friendly

It’s no news that most of your website visitors use mobile devices to browse and make purchases from your site. 82% of internet users in the US have used mobile devices for shopping online. If your store is not mobile-friendly, then you are missing out on a lot.

• Ensure that your website design is responsive and adapts to all screen sizes.
• Take efforts to reduce mobile page load speed.
• Ensure that all the elements of your site are the same for both the mobile and desktop versions.
• Use Google’s free test to ensure the mobile-friendliness of your site.

10. Leverage Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to build credibility and popularize your eCommerce store. Unfortunately, very few are taking advantage of this strategy.

Analyze and make a list of social media influencers, thought leaders, or celebrities relevant to your industry. Reach out and collaborate with them by campaigning on major social media platforms where your target audience tends to hang out.

Such influencer collaborations can significantly add to your eCommerce store’s credibility. You’ll gain quick popularity and will ultimately achieve massive success.

11. Personalize the Buying Experience

Personalization is vital for attracting new customers and retaining them as loyal customers. You can personalize your eCommerce website by gathering information about the users’ demographics, interests, buying habits, etc.

Using these data, you can provide an ultra-personalized shopping experience to your customers by customizing your home page based on recently viewed products or featuring products that users of similar demographics tend to be more interested in.

You can also consider using an AI-powered fully-automated eCommerce personalization and conversion optimization platform like Dialogue that generates personalized messages automatically based on your audience’s specific preferences and sales patterns.

The platform tracks and analyzes user behavior on-site to provide the best possible custom journey that’ll increase the likelihood or purchases.

To Conclude

Building and running an eCommerce store can be quite daunting for many store owners. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and lost amongst millions of other eCommerce sites.

By following these strategies, you have a chance to stand out and beat your competitors with ease. Hence start your journey towards building a high-successful eCommerce website today!