Pros and Cons of Using Magento For eCommerce

Ecommerce platforms have dramatically reduced the investment, effort, time, and resources required in setting up online stores. However, even with reduced barriers to entry into the market, entrepreneurs must still go through the ordeal develop their business plans that state their goals, defines their product and service offering, the product’s unique selling points, identifies their target market, profiles their target audience, and locates the best eCommerce platform for their business needs. A simple search will bring up the name of Magento as the leading choice of retailers across the globe. It is an open-source platform that allows development of secure, robust, and user-friendly online stores. This post will bring the platform in perspective of advantages and disadvantages.

Advantages of Using Magento for eCommerce

Multi-Tiered

Multiple editions for developing a robust eCommerce store with Magento are offered. Each edition caters to the specific needs of the business. This means reduced costs of development. The editions include:

• Magento Community for hobbyists and developers
• Magento Enterprise for SMEs
• Magento Enterprise Premium for growing and large organizations and businesses
• Magento Go — for merchants and entrepreneurs who want to avoid infrastructure cost of hosting the software and store.

Feature Rich

Magento offers a diverse range of out-of-the-box feature set. Given its open source nature and a buzzing community of developers, new options and features are continuously added as the business community adopts Magento, and forces development of new features to meet the full range of eCommerce retailers. Furthermore, once the store is built, you will find that it is intrinsically linked with Google’s third party services including Analytics, Base, and Checkout, allowing you to analyze user data and conversation behavior.

User Friendly

Magento’s admin area is designed intuitively, with simple easy-to-use dashboard and a range of organized store management features. Furthermore, Magento responsive template designs allow you to seamlessly manage your store front across multiple mobile devices. You can easily brand your apps on Android, iOS, and other devices.

SEO Friendly

Keeping your online store search engine friendly has never been easier. Magento’s platform offers inbuilt SEO features that easily allow you to modify and optimize elements of your page and rank better on SERPs.

Friendly Payment Options

Magento incorporates payments from multiple platforms, including PayPal Express, Standard and Website Payments Pro. Furthermore, the platform is directly linked to WebServiceX, automatically updating currency rates, allowing you to take your store global and change your prices accordingly.

Has Largest eCommerce Marketplace

Magento Connect is the leading online eCommerce marketplace, allowing its user access to thousands of extensions capable of answering nearly every customization you might have in mind. Whether your’re looking for Plugins or Themes, fewer and fewer customizations are being left in the hands of developers.

Magento Product Data Management

Magento developed for all worldwide shoppers to list products using Magento Simple, Configurable, virtual, grouped, bundle, gift card products types.

Disadvantages

Magento is highly resource intensive platform, this raises constraints in terms of costs, development time, and effort.

Requires High End Hosting

Magento requires a lot of processing power, memory, and storage to function properly. Unless it is hosted on a robust and dedicated server, your online store is likely to slow down as traffic and orders increase.

Complex Coding and Development

Magento is a complex platform with over 20,000 files and 200 database tables. Furthermore, the platform is unforgiving if the backend programming, and use of system modules and databases is not integrated properly.