eBay, one of the leaders in online commerce marketplaces, owns Magento e-commerce software. From its humble beginning way back 2007, Magento becomes an amazing leader of the industry with more than 125, 000 online stores under its umbrella. Taking pride in its powerful and reliable features, Magento has helped small businesses to reach their potential as a global player. Magento closely works with customers or clients through its resources and experience in handling world-class partners like PayPal, eBay Marketplaces and many more. Its commitment to provide the best e-commerce solution deploys developer certification programs, trainings and other knowledge-based education. Online merchants can bank on the features of Magento e-commerce solution, as well as on the support on how to utilize Magento efficiently.
Overview of Magento
Prior to the acquisition of eBay, Inc., Magento was developed by Verian as a new e-commerce solution. Since eBay owned Magento, it has become a powerful e-commerce shopping cart platform offering online stores around the world, including big brands such as OfficeMax, Nike, Nestle, Pentel, The North Face, and many more. Magento is packed with essential features that are simple and easy-to-use that there is no need for technical knowledge to utilize the e-commerce platform. The goal of Magento is to help online merchants attract customers and retain their market share by making the buying experience easier and better, fostering the reputation of the brand, and customizing the online store for a better marketing pitch. This e-commerce software offers scalable technologies that help businesses grow into industry power players. Magento Community Edition can be downloaded for free under the open source language 3.0 license. The e-commerce software is available in two editions: the Enterprise and the Enterprise Premium.
Website Design
If you to expedite the design and look of your store, Magento offers several templates. For novices, Magento templates may seem difficult to handle and complex. In fact, you need to learn some of the basic coding language for the customization of designs. And for new marketers, hiring a website designer is a big bother to their capital investments. But if you wish to create a design from a scratch, Magento supports the approach also.
Modular upgrades or updates will not damage any of the template customization being made on Magento store. A responsive store, which is compatible with mobile devices, can also be easily installed or setup with the Magento website design settings. Another good thing about the website design of Magento is its clean and professional look. Customers will not be lost while navigating on the online store.
Back Office
Through the Back Office of the e-commerce shopping cart, reports of abandoned shopping carts can help online merchants to do triggering follow-ups. One of the Magento setbacks is the overly complicated coding that it takes good knowledge on Apache Servers, MySQL, CSS, XML, PHP and HTML to customize designs and other areas of the store. With the Back Office or the Administration Center, you can add or edit product details, categories, descriptions, reviews and other information. For an increased marketing strategy, Magento's Back Office allows online merchants to send newsletters and emails to customers seamlessly.
An advantage of Magento's Back Office is the wide range of add-ons or modules you can add seamlessly. Add-on modules increase the functionality and capability of your store to provide a good shopping experience for customers. For instance, the 'store view' allows an online merchant to setup different stores, with multilingual capability, in a single click.
Shopping Features
Magento online stores maintain powerful inventory management features including privates sales, bulk uploading of products or catalogs, and support for soft and hard goods. It is easier to customize order quantities and the capability to handle advanced searches for customers to locate products easier.
Products stored in the Magento’s store database are easy to retrieve to cut off inconvenience on the side of the customer. As customers shop around the store, they may register an account which will ease out the checking out and shopping. For a better customer experience, product reviews can be generated and added to the online store. Nonetheless, there are several shipping carriers available to assure customers that their orders will arrive on time and in shape.
Payment Options
There are 100 payment gateways that are integrated with Magento, including Moneybrookers, WorldPay, Paybox, eWay and Beanstream. Variety of payment gateways cater for most of the market without disenfranchisement customers. The automatic payment zone disablement ensures that certain payment gateways are only available to certain regions. As much as payment gateways are available, automatic or real-time calculation of shipping fees is also embedded in the functionality of Magento store. Partnered shipping carriers include USPS, FedEx, Canadian Post, UPS, and many more.
However, you need to remember that offering store's customer’s gifts, discount coupons,
Tax Customization
Due to the different tax laws of state and counties (for United States), and provinces or regions, Magento is powered with a flexible tax implementation feature to cater for regional tax differences and statutes. In the same manner, online merchants can set up different tax rates on products, depending on the grade or type of taxable product – for instance, whether VATable or not. Shipping fees are also automatically taxed and reflected on the total cost of the product checkout.
Due to the different tax laws of state and counties (for United States), and provinces or regions, Magento is powered with a flexible tax implementation feature to cater for regional tax differences and statutes. In the same manner, online merchants can set up different tax rates on products, depending on the grade or type of taxable product – for instance, whether VATable or not. Shipping fees are also automatically taxed and reflected on the total cost of the product checkout.
Marketing Features
Aside from abandoned shopping carts report, Magento also creates reports on most viewed items or bestsellers, and stock reports to avoid out-of-stocks situation. Magento's marketing features are ones of the best that you can get with this e-commerce solution. For a layered navigation, Magento uses auto-generation of URLs, but users can always customize URL top fit the page structure. Other SEO capabilities of Magento include a Google Site Map, Products meta information and categories, Popular Terms Page, and many more. With plenty of extremely rich and solid SEO features, what Magento lacks is the organization of these features in the Back Office. Add to that, shoppers may opt to subscribe to emails, newsletters, and marketing messages.
Security Features
Customers don't need to worry about the security of their financial information as they checkout, SSL Certifications are used by Magento to protect these vulnerable data from hacking and identity theft. As data reach the Magento server, the information is stored on secured storage centers with high-level of security levels prior to retrieval. With these features, online merchants can use HTTPS or SSL on all log-in pages. The SSH File Transfer Protocol can also be used by merchants to avoid hacking and fishing of sensitive data.
Customer Support
Magento's customer service call center can answer queries in real-time via the request from. If you want to get answers and resolve issues by your own, there are live forums and community you can join. It will connect you with other Magento users. However, even with these customer supports, Magento users still complain on the poor performance of customer support. At other times, Magento users need to search and fine for themselves the answers to their questions.
Cost
There are three major editions of Magento available for usage. The Community Edition is available for free download; it can be used under the open source language license, but features are limited and may not work completely with online stores. The Magento Enterprise is priced at $14, 420 with a one non production and one production Magento server license. It also includes a Gold Level customer support. Magento Enterprise Premium offers an ultimate e-commerce package with all features of the Magento Enterprise. One more production and non-production server license with Platinum level customer support will also be included in the package. The professional training can hype up your knowledge on how to utilize Magento into the next level for the improvement of your store.
