What is Magento?

The eCommerce Solution Ready To Take Your Business to the Next Level

If your business sells products or services, how do you make them available for public consumption? If you have a brick-and-mortar store, the answer is quite obvious. You place the products on the shelves and post signage for your services. People walk in and buy your goods.

But what if you don’t have a physical store? How do you sell your wares then? The most logical and efficient way to sell products without a physical store is from a virtual store, otherwise known as eCommerce.

For those that are behind the curve, eCommerce is another term for selling products online. And there are a plethora of platforms to make this a reality. Even better, most of those platforms can integrate into the website you already have. These eCommerce solutions allow you to sell physical and digital products, services, and even subscriptions.

For any business trying to expand its offerings, if you’ve yet to consider an eCommerce solution, now is a perfect time. With more and more people turning to purchase products online, it’s a win-win scenario. That’s because the number of online shoppers in 2021 is expected to be a staggering 2.14 billion. And given how the world has changed, you can expect that number to continue to rise dramatically. That’s something you can’t ignore.

That means it’s high time for your company to start selling online.

But how do you pull off this feat? What software can make eCommerce a reality for your business? One of the most widely-used platforms on the planet is the open-source Magento.

Magento makes it easy for you to not just sell your products, but:

Create promotions
Manage an entire catalog of products
Optimize your online store for search engines (SEO)
Make it easy for customers to easily browse and search for your products
Use easy one-page checkouts and shopping carts
Save user credit card information
Manage orders
Offer customer account dashboards
Offer plenty of customer service options
Support mobile HTML5
Support mobile apps for Android and iOS
Integrate a wide range of checkout capabilities

Magento also includes:

Targeted promotions
Dynamic rule-based product relations
Persistent shopping
Automated email marketing reminders
Private sales
Gift registries
Gifting Options
Rewards points
Store credits
Multiple wish lists
Add to cart via SKU
Return Management Authorization (RMA)

For any business concerned about scaling, Magento has you covered. Magento 2.0 can:

Process large numbers of orders per hour
Handle near-instant server response times for catalog browsing
Significantly reduce response times for cart and checkout pages
Handle peak order volume, even with very large product catalogs, and customer lists
Have simultaneous administrators on the backend

If you’re looking for one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available, Magento is what you need.

Integrating Magento Into Your Site

One thing you must know about Magento is that it includes both the eCommerce platform as well as a Content Management System (CMS). If you’ve already built your company site, you could find yourself in a situation where your eCommerce site will dictate the changes required for your main site.

To solve that problem, Magento is a themeable platform, so you can either have your in-house developers create a Magento theme that mimics your main site (so the 2 are indistinguishable), or you can turn to a third party for this task. Either way, it’s very possible to get Magento to resemble your current site.

If you’ve yet to build your site, you could then get Magento up and running, with either a pre-packed or custom theme, and then build your site around it.

A third option would be to relaunch your site. This option can be very appealing, as it shows your business is serious about eCommerce and can serve as a sort of grand “re-opening” of your online presence.

Of course, you could always go the opposite direction and first build your Magento site. Once you have that complete, you could either use the built-in CMS tool or even add a WordPress blog into Magento.

Your best route, however, might be to build both Magento and WordPress sites and then integrate them with the Magento 2 WordPress Integration plugin. This WordPress plugin allows you to combine the powerful eCommerce solution with the CMS/blog capabilities of WordPress. It also gives users a unified experience, which shares session/cart data, navigation menus, headers, footers, products, layout elements, and static blocks by way of WordPress shortcuts or functions.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Magento does require PHP7. The latest release depends on PHP 7.3 and won’t function on any version older than that. So when you’re working with developers to build your Magento-based eCommerce site, you must use the latest PHP iteration.

For those of you who might not be savvy enough to either blend Magento and WordPress or build a custom site to work with Magento, you can always turn to onshore, nearshore, or offshore developers to take care of the development. Because Magento is so widely used, most skilled web developers can work with the platform.