An open source platform - Magento is a shopping cart that let you create flexible fully functional online shopping websites. Magento is powerful and one of the fastest growing eCommerce web application framework worldwide. Magento is secured and supports most of the payment methods. It was developed and launched by Magento Inc. (earlier known as Varien). Magento is based on Zend Framework which works well with PHP and MySQL as database. Today Magento eCommerce platform is developers first choice with above 150,000 existing online businesses, along with world’s leading brands. In todays post, we would like to throw some light on the features that makes Magento best shopping cart :
1.Architecture Some experts call Magento as over-architected. Magento's architect is so powerful that it can meet almost every website need. Magento is designed to scale and customize. It avoids common issues that a developer could face. Magento has taken care of all the problems that are encountered in other platforms causing trouble,
2 Out of Box Feature Magento justifies this feature in a well organized manner. Stock Magento is available with simple, configurable, grouped and Digital Products. A merchant can use it to sell tickets for holiday events and manage music store simultaneously and that too without any extensions.
3.Extensions Magento offer a huge collection of extensions that are easily integrated easily suffice business needs. These extensions are available for very specific requirements, otherwise you can get help from community/ developers and get an extension designed for you. The pricing for extensions are surprisingly cheap unless you need it for a CRM integration. To quote an example here, one of the major accounting softwares is quickbooks and its simple to integrate Magento with quickbooks extension.
4. Community Magento is conceived for open source software. It has a big community of talented programmers who are ready to assist you whenever a question is raised. Due to such a strong community, Magento has got a tremendous growth and downloaded thousands of times.
5. Support Keeping online store up and running is very important for consistent success. Every minute the website is down equals lost revenue. Magento's team of support experts is always available 24 x 7 for global support. They are prompt on responses and resolve issues as quickly as possible. They pride themselves as the highest percentage for first call resolution.
6. Larger eCommerce Websites Magento shopping cart is more suitable for eCommerce web sites with multi stores. Magento leads the ranking for best eCommerce framework with around 25% of world's online shopping websites running on Magento. Some of the world's highly effective eCommerce websites like Samsung and Harvey Nichols are running on Magento.
7. Simple and Easy Administration While making customization this platform requires advanced programming skills, however the admin system is pretty simple to use and someone with less technical knowledge (it could be the business owner) can easily make changes to the website if required. The analysis and reporting modules are also easy to operate and understand.
8. Integrate Open Source CMS Magento offers easy integration with other open source CMS. This allows the website owners to easily manage the main eCommerce website with along with the blog and keeping the non business portion of the website isolated. An example of such an integration is a business owner can make eCommerce websites SEO friendly without effecting the eCommerce section of the website.
9.Customization Magento Themes Design Magento offer complete customization over design themes. Merchants can design their websites and as per their requirement they can display their brand image. The level of customization magento offers is not available with any other shopping cart.
10. Reporting tools Magento offers reporting suite that provides visibility to business performance and helps to make necessary changes to react to your customers needs. The quick integration with Google Analytics offer easy analysis to the traffic trends. This lets the website owners to receive the detailed insights of their store performance. Above mentioned features are on broader view that makes Magento a better shopping cart than most of the available eCommerce platforms. If we analyze it in more depth we can find dozens of other features that makes Magento Web Developers's first choice.
