E-Commerce has a number of advantages when compared to brick and mortar businesses. For instance, you can do business 24X7 and moreover, you have a global reach. It allows customers to shop anywhere and at any time.
The critical part of every E-Commerce website is its online transaction platform. Getting complacent with the selection of an E-Commerce platform could open up Pandora’s Box, bringing with it all sorts of unsolicited complications.
A platform that you can trust with your eyes closed is Magento, which is one of the most popular open source platforms that can be downloaded for FREE. As per Tom Robertshaw’s E-Commerce survey, Magento is the most widely used E-Commerce platform with close to 26% market share.
Despite being free, it offers a comprehensive set of functionalities that will help you analyse and grow your business.
Here is a list of some of the most significant features offered by Magento:
Magento enables your website to be accessed from multiple platforms such as Laptops, Mobiles Tablets and Phablets. It is a known fact that people are increasingly switching to hand held devices to surf the net. Having a mobile compatible website allows you to sell your products to customers even when they are on the move. Over 400 million people use mobile phone to access Facebook and the number will only increase. Having an m-commerce website could give you the much needed edge over your competitors.
2. Analyse, Optimize and Report
Magento allows you to integrate your website with Google Analytics, another free and a handy tool, making it easy for you to assess and analyse your key performance indicators. You can easily zero in on the problem areas and subsequently resolve them. Moreover, it helps you identify and select keywords that are the major traffic drivers, thereby helping in your SEO efforts.
3. Secure Payment Options
Magento lets customers use multiple payment options such as check, credit cards, cash-on-delivery and so on. It also supports to embed multiple payment processors such as PayPal, Sage pay, Braintree and WorldPay to name a few. Its multi-layer security protocol makes the online transactions safe and secure. It provides 3D Secure Credit Card Validation and Kount Fraud Detection that can detect and track possible online payment frauds.
4. Superior Buying Experience
Magento helps customers have a complete look and feel of your products. It allows customers to zoom on the product’s image, see multiple images of the products, and go through product reviews. In addition to these, it also allows you to cross and upsell by suggesting products that the customer might be interested in based upon his past purchasing and surfing history.
5. Flexible and Easy to Manage
Magento, being an open source E-Commerce platform makes it easier for the developers to modify and add functionalities. Therefore, it is more flexible and adaptive no matter how complex and diverse your business needs may be. However to do so, your development team will have to work in consultation with Magento which is rarely an issue.
6. Magento Community
Magento offers a wealth of knowledge and expertise to their online community. It can be stated as an enterprise grade E-Commerce platform as it enables you to easily evolve with a growing business community.
Image Source: Magento Blog
Leave a Reply