The thought of developing an e-commerce store for your business can be a daunting task. But which application should you choose? Will your store work on mobile devices? And how do you keep your customers credit card info secure? These are all great questions – and here is why we believe Magento Commerce is your answer:
1. Magento is a Proven, Flexible Platform
Magento is owned by ebay, one of the largest marketplaces on the web and the software is used on thousands of online stores. The Community Edition is a great place to start. It’s an open source platform, allowing developers to access and modify the code in order to customize the design and functionality of the website. This also means you are not tied to annual software licenses or restricted to a certain hosting environment.
Their API also allows for connecting with all types of web-based and standalone applications. This provides further benefits by allowing the Magento store to communicate with other software programs, such as accounting or inventory systems.
2. Ability to Add Features & Functionality with Extensions
Magento offers the Connect Marketplace, that stocked full of extensions to help customize your Magento store. You can browse Magento’s catalog of extensions for: sales & promotions, custom products, simplified check-outs, accounting and many other tools to help you build a better online store.
3. Mobile Friendly
Magento enables M-Commerce with an option to add a mobile-optimized version of your site to attract and convert customers shopping from smart-phones. Magento will automatically detect the users that are viewing from mobile browsers and display the mobile-optimized version of your site. You can choose to show the full inventory or a smaller selection of products tailored for your mobile customers –either way, they’ll have a great experience, and you’ll see an increase in mobile sales.
4. SEO Friendly
One ultra-important feature of Magento that the software was developed to be Search Engine (SEO) friendly. Soon after you launch your site you’ll see your website and products appearing in the major search engines. There is also dozens of plug-ins with advanced SEO capabilities.
5. Ability to Grow with You
Although you may be starting with just a handful of products, your inventory could easily grow into the hundreds or thousands. The Magento platform is scalable to an infinite number of products and features. Just note that if you expand to hundreds of products or install and advanced plug-ins, you’ll want to be sure that your site is hosted with a reliable Magento hosting partner. These partners are experts in making your site load fast and run efficiently – which will decrease the number of order drop-offs and increase your sales.
At Brainstorm, our go-to E-commerce platform is Magento. If you’re considering starting an online store or re-developing an existing one, we’d love to help. Our years of experience with the platform and its various plug-ins can heIp get your store up and running quickly and efficiently.