Every business worth its salt – in fact, any business that expects to stay relevant in the crowded, competitive modern world – needs to have an online presence, even if it’s just in order to provide marketing support. However, the best and most successful online businesses don’t just have information about their products and services on their websites; in a realm where conversion is king, you need to have an ecommerce solution in order to maximize your business growth.
There are many different ecommerce platforms out there, but there’s one in particular – Magento – that is growing in popularity. Whether you’re building a brand new ecommerce site for your business or you’re looking for ways to revitalize an existing site, here’s why Magento might be the right choice for you.
Open and Accessible
As a platform, Magento offers professional enterprise-level ecommerce solutions for the biggest – and most deep-pocketed – of businesses. However, it’s also available as a free download under an open source license that trades some of the more advanced functionalities that start-up businesses may need in exchange for the ability to access the code and customize the functionality and look of the platform.
Because there is an open source option available to businesses, a large developer, programmer, and business owner community has built up around Magento to constantly improve the open source version. The members of this community are in constant communication with one another, making it an excellent choice for anyone looking for advice or tips on integrating Magento into their own ecommerce project.
The Freedom of Modular Design
In addition to the benefits of an open source platform with a strong community behind it, Magento is also designed to be modular. This means it’s not tied to a particular hosting service like many of the other ecommerce platforms available to businesses – and that you won’t have to necessarily pay through the nose in order to access an exclusive platform.
All too many ecommerce platforms are bound to particular webhosts, which limits the choices available to anyone looking to implement an ecommerce solution for their business site. However, Magento is compatible with a wide variety of hosting systems, and this means you’ll rarely run into a situation where you won’t be able to get Magento up and running with your particular host and integrated into your website. This provides you with the freedom you need to concentrate on more important things – like driving visitor traffic to your site and converting them to customers.
Back End Brilliance
Magento offers excellent front end ecommerce solutions that will provide an attractive and well-designed business site to interact with customers and make sales, but under the hood there’s some particularly brilliant programming that keeps the engine humming along. The Magento Application Programming Interface (API) makes it easy to integrate with, connect to, and exchange information with a number of online systems and standalone apps that can enhance overall functionality, all without making it a chore for a web designer or developer to get these disparate systems working in sync with one another.
In addition to the versatility of the Magento API, it’s also designed to provide for excellent search engine results. Built-in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) functions make it easy to keep your ecommerce site SEO-friendly. This will ensure that search engine results featuring products or services you offer through your ecommerce solution should appear higher up in the results list and closer to the top than they would otherwise – and this means the chances of a prospective customer clicking on that search link are just that much higher.
