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Magento is one of the most popular online selling channels for a reason—It is a powerful open-source PHP platform that’s built for eCommerce. Magento is an extremely robust and advanced eCommerce platform which offers a dynamic and effective solution for merchants of all sizes.
Magento Open Source
Magento Open Source, previously Magento Community, gives you a lot of room to cater your store to your exact specifications. If you have developer resources available, and your own hosting set up, Magento can be the blank canvas you need to create your store exactly as you want. One of the most appealing aspects of Magento Open Source is that it has no licensing fee. And with 12% of all eCommerce sites using Magento, it boasts a robust marketplace of plugins and extensions to help you extend and scale your website. While the Magento Open Source platform is free, the web-hosting costs and developer resources can quickly drive up the total cost of ownership.
Magento Commerce
If you are a growing business, Magento Commerce offers more services and dedicated support options than a standard Magento Open Source site. With the availability of dedicated AWS hosting, greater native functionality, and ability to scale, Magento Commerce is a preferred option for enterprise businesses. While the marketplace is a great asset to Magento merchants, stores that utilize too many add-ons can see a negative effect on the performance of their site. This makes the additional out-of-the-box feature set of Magento Commerce extra valuable to businesses who need advanced B2B functionality, marketing, loyalty, and more.
Scalability
As your eCommerce business grows, you want your tools and software to grow with it. After all, migrating order, product, and customer data between platforms can be a time-consuming and costly endeavor. A key advantage of Magento is that it can grow with your business. Your Magento site is as powerful as the plugins and features you add to it.
One such example of scalability is Magento 2’s split database solution. This allows you to distribute your orders, checkout, and product data between 3 servers. This segmentation can allow your site to run smoothly even during peak business. The scalability allowed by the split database is another great selling point for the Magento Commerce edition.
SEO
Magento edges out some of their competition for SEO since it offers out-of-the-box tools that you might not be able to readily find in other platforms. Its product-level metadata settings allow you to optimize search results by setting meta titles, keywords, and descriptions.
Multiple Storefronts
Magento offers convenient support for multiple storefronts. Whether you need stores for different audiences, user groups, or languages, Magento provides options for you. So, regardless of whether you have B2C, B2B, or multiple variations of each, you can configure each from scratch or by cloning and reproducing each of your stores.
Guides and Forums
Because Magento is one of the most common platforms for eCommerce sellers, and because of its open source design, there is a lot of developer forums and guides available. The Magento Community is perhaps the strongest resource available. This is where users, developers, and Magento employees post developer guides, github docs, forums, courses, and events for public use. Stack Overflow also has a large library of FAQs and code snippets that address common Magento issues and setup questions. For Magento Open Source users, this is a great resource if you freelance your developer work.
In Conclusion
If you are looking for a fully-customizable upgrade to your current platform, Magento can let you build your dream online store. It offers a scalable solution that allows users to add and subtract modules as needed. As the eCommerce landscape continues its rapid growth, a long-term solution is key. And frequently, a customizable solution is the best one. Magento is more than a blank canvas—it is the canvas, the paint, the brushes, and everything else you need to make your vision become reality.
A special thank you to our partners at ShipStation for authoring this blog.
ShipStation is the leading web-based shipping software that helps online retailers streamline their order fulfillment, wherever they sell and however they ship. Their features include: order importing from over 90 selling channels, auto-selecting shipping preferences, custom fulfillment rules, multi-carrier label creation (for over 30 carriers including USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL), automatic shipping confirmations, and more! Sign up for a free trial today.
For more information on the Magento platform and how it can benefit your store, contact us today!