There are literally a wide range of eCommerce platforms out there to kick-start your business online. However, based on your requirement and features the choice may vary.
If your business is small and you don’t possess any development knowledge then you can go with WooCommerce, Shopify etc.
But if the scale of your business is medium to large and if you have a team with development knowledge or have the budget to hire a development agency, Magento 2 is what you should opt for.
That’s because Magento 2 is the next generation platform. Magento 2 can power your online business with functionalities, integrations and features that you need for a world-class eCommerce store.
Let us take a look at why Magento 2 is a great option for medium and large scale businesses.
Easy Scalability
When choosing an eCommerce platform for your store, scalability should be the most significant factor.
The reason is that the inability to effectively scale an e-commerce website can turn out to be a significant roadblock. And most online store owners tend to overlook this.
As a matter of fact, expanding your online business should be an effortless task. It should not affect your website’s speed, functionality, user-friendliness, and most importantly your profits.
This is where the flexible and modular architecture of Magento is a boon. It helps you to continually adjust, customize and extend your website to further accommodate functionalities.
To enable this, you have a large variety of embedded features like marketing tools, data catalogue management, analytics, SEO engine optimization, reporting, etc.
The agile Magento ecosystem helps in extending your store’s functionality with inbuilt, third-party or custom modules. Features like multi-store and multilingual facility are available in the core platform itself for scalability.
High Performance
When it comes to performance, 53% of website visitors leave a page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This statistic is very relevant and critical for eCommerce websites because speed affects revenue as well.
Therefore, before scaling your online store, you need to make sure that you have a high speed, performance-optimized online store that can handle huge traffic and concurrent users.
Some of the features that Magento 2 provides that significantly enhance your eCommerce stores performance are:
- Full page cache: Full page cache is a default feature in Magento 2, which caches all static pages, and therefore, increases the performance significantly and reduces the server load.
- Background indexers: Indexers deliver efficient updates and faster query performance. The indexers are asynchronous and they would be working in the background. So they won’t block the processes and will boost performance.
- Varnish: Magento 2 is integrated with Varnish Cache — the leading HTTP accelerator technology, which helps reducing server load and speed up the page load by caching common requests.
- Magento performance toolkit: Create test environments, test code changes, verify and optimize system performance and do a lot more with the script and JMeter tests in this toolkit. This helps with consistency and repeat performance testing for Magento applications.
Customer Segmentation and Personalization
Magento offers a pool of flexible and highly customizable personalization solutions. These solutions increase conversion rates by dynamically displaying content, promotions, and pricing to specific customers.
You can personalize the following website features with customer segmentation:
- CMS banners: Personalize CMS Banners to deliver different experiences for customers. For example, present different discounts and coupon code offers to customers belonging to different customer segments.
- Dynamic rule-based product relations: Define dynamic rule-based product relations for each customer segment. As a result, offer up-sells, cross-sells, and related products catering to specific customer segments.
- Shopping cart price rules: Set up shopping cart price rules to allow discounts/promotions to customers in a specific customer segment.
- Instant purchase: Present returning shoppers with a new ‘Instant Purchase’ checkout option. Customers can use previously-stored payment credentials and shipping information to skip checkout steps, making the process fast and easy. This really boosts the conversion rates for returning shoppers.
As a matter of fact, there are plenty of third-party personalization solutions as well available in Magento’s marketplace. These come packed with advanced features, like AI-driven customer segmentation or more profound visitor insights.
Content Staging and Preview
Firstly, the content staging and preview feature enables your business teams to easily create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates.
This includes updates to product descriptions, categories, and promotions, directly from the store admin. All, without involving the development team. If you think about it, this is a great tool to increase the productivity of your business team.
For another, with content staging, you can have a particular page or a set of page elements, which can be automatically enabled, based on a predefined schedule for a specified time.
This is a perfect solution for setting up and managing promotions.
Visual Merchandising
Magento 2 comes with easy visual merchandising features for store managers like:
- Drag and drop feature for arranging products.
- Optimization for category pages via sorting rules that order products by bestsellers, colour, highest margin or newest addition.
- Ability to define rules for automatic assignment of products to a specific category based on attributes like brand, price, created date etc.
Elasticsearch Technology
Integrated Elasticsearch technology helps to handle large catalogues and easily scale search capacity as queries grow.
Elasticsearch offers to autocomplete, suggestions for customer misspellings, support for stop words and attribute weighting, as well as synonym management to increase relevancy and conversions.
This is a great way to increase engagement by visitors and drive conversions.
Responsive Design Themes
A responsive theme smoothly adjusts its layout based on the screen size and resolution of the device. Magento 2 comes with a default responsive theme.
Since responsive themes adapt and adjust the layout, menus and images and the pages with the required features are displayed to fit desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile device screens, it cannot be ignored.
These themes also offer SEO advantages. Therefore, it becomes necessary to choose a great responsive theme for even more mileage for your eCommerce store.
Powerful Admin Experience
The Magento 2 Admin comes with a modern and intuitive user interface. A dashboard lets you monitor your business with quick access to sales, orders, search terms and best-selling products data.
Intuitive navigation and search make it easy to find information. Also, the management screens can be customized and saved to speed up day-to-day tasks.
The result is that it allows you to get down to business quickly with actionable silos displayed upfront on a consolidated dashboard. You can drill deeper into specifics right from the dashboard.
IN a nut shell, management of your store becomes all the more intuitive and friendly.
Managed Cloud Solution
Magento Commerce Cloud is a managed, automated hosting platform. It is based on the AWS (Amazon Web Services) environment with high availability and scalability.
This platform provides top performance, delivered by a high-speed CDN and performance management tools.
Therefore, with Magento Cloud, you can focus on growing your business rather than spending time on managing your IT infrastructure.
Technical and Account Support
Magento’s dedicated Technical Support is available 24×7 to help resolve technical issues and questions.
Dedicated Account Managers can point you to the right resources and help you get the most out of your Magento platform. As a matter of fact, they work closely with you to get to know your business and extend support whenever required.
Over to you
Put together, if you are a medium or large-scale business looking to grow your footprint online via eCommerce, Magento 2 would be the ideal platform.
It allows you to start with optimum features and grow incrementally as your online business grows. The best part about Magento 2 is that it allows for scalability without a hitch.
If you would like to explore more about taking your business online with Magento 2, shout out to us and we will gladly arrange for a quick familiarisation meeting so that you can be better informed before you decide on your choice of platform.