If you played video games in the 90s or early 2000s, you’ll be familiar with how they were very limited in the gameplay options. You could only enter certain buildings, the rocks that were painted differently from the rest of the artwork were what you could interact with, and you had set boundaries of where all your character could move. Then along came open world games; games like Skyrim, the Witcher, or, the pioneer of the genre, GTA.
With these games you could go out and do what you wanted, even if it had nothing to do with the missions you were assigned that would progress the plot. You could customize your character’s appearance, go for a swim just because, or steal an ambulance and become a paramedic for ten minutes. It opened up a whole new world and changed gaming altogether.
What does all this have to do with eCommerce? Well, Magento Commerce is like GTA. It’s like an open world eCommerce platform which allows you to build the system you want to meet the unique requirements of your online store. It allows you to use the tools and build the infrastructure you need, not just what most people need. Most importantly, it enables your eCommerce site to stand out from the crowd and gives you an edge in the competitive world of online shopping.
So let’s get into the advantages Magento Commerce can offer your online business.
The Sandbox E-Commerce Builder
Basic video games can certainly be fun, but sometimes you want to off-road on a motorcycle or parachute off buildings rather than completing the set tasks. In the same regard, popular platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce can satisfy typical eCommerce functions. However, if those limited options don’t work for your situation, you’ll oftentimes run into difficulties with trying to expand the functionalities of these systems.
Magento eCommerce is fully customizable to suit your needs. Below we’ll go into the specifics of the benefits of Magento that its competitors don’t have.
Seamless Scalability
The coolest new games hit the market with a hefty price tag of $60-$70. They know they’re the best, freshest, and most cutting edge out there. Plenty of people buy them and love being among the first to play through them, discovering tricks and Easter eggs along the way.
For the same reason, don’t let the Magento Commerce price tag and time investment turn you off. This is a platform that will scale with your company. Even if you’re not big now, Magento won’t limit your growth in the future. It’s the platform that allows you the most freedom to scale up and scale up quickly. Don’t set yourself up for slow growth at the get-go with a limited platform.
With Magento you can add the functions you need as you need them. The platform grows with you and can adapt to changing customer bases, market environments, or business goals. This makes it perfect for small businesses that are planning to grow. As you level up, the platform levels with you.
Superior SEO
While all sites provide a level of SEO support to help ensure your page is showing up in the searches related to your products, Magento outshines its competitors. It is specifically built around SEO and features high level SEO functionalities that go well beyond the basics that other eCommerce platforms provide.
Compared with its closest competitors, WooCommerce and Shopify, Magento ranks 100/100 in its SEO scoring, while the other two are tied at 98. Although it may seem like just a minor difference in ranking, this small bump could mean your result appearing just above or below the “fold” on a user’s Google results page. Having to scroll a bit or not can make it or break it in the competitive landscape of online shopping.
Multiple Sites
One of the main standout features of Magento is that you can operate multiple sites from one system. Shopify and other major platforms require you to have separate accounts for each online store, even if they share the same inventory. This means you’re doubling up on a lot of work, wasting time, and constantly having to sync up separate systems. This is a lot of lost capital.
With Magento, when operating multiple stores you have all sorts of options. Do you want to enable customers to use the same login information across your linked eCommerce stores? Done. Do you have a shared inventory used across multiple sites? Syncing is made easy. Don’t need either, but just want the same setup on the backend? Admin panel is set up for all the sites in a jiffy.
Having the options available to sync what you want and need across all your online properties gives Magento Commerce a huge advantage over its competitors.
High Level of Customization
Magento Commerce is most notable for its customization capabilities. This is the major point that separates it from other eCommerce options available on the market. Most platforms offer preset themes that all look very similar and generic. While these can satisfy the typical needs of a basic eCommerce business, should you need any extra features, they will be harder to come by than with Magento.
To bring it back to GTA, have you heard that you can play the game normally, except you are one of the Mario characters? Well, with Magento, you can similarly modify your eCommerce platform with third-party tools that make your site stand out from the crowd.
The system is open source, so at its core the code is not proprietary and allows for external developers to tweak it to suit their needs. There are plenty of features within Magento itself, but when those are not enough you have the option to use third-party add-ons and integrations.
You’re able to customize any part of the site you’d like, from the general layout and architecture, to the number of details you provide about your products, to how your customers go about checkout. Every step of the journey can be tailored to optimize your own unique customer journey and set you apart from your competitors.
Due to this flexibility, you can avail of the knowledge offered by expert Magento website development agencies, like 121eCommerce. They can help you evaluate what precisely you need on your site, what the snags are in your current customer journey and user experience, and work out ecommerce solutions to make everything work more user-friendly, while looking sharp and unique. Cleaner sites and shopping experiences equal more completed purchases.
Other platforms are closed systems with limitations on third-party integrations, meaning they lack the flexibility and adaptability Magento has to offer.
Simple Integrations
In order to support this level of customization, Magento Development ensures a smooth integration process with third-party plugins. Here are just a few of the main integrations Magento users commonly avail of:
- Google Analytics
- Google Shopping
- Shipping
- Tracking
- Transportation
- Various payment gateways on the checkout page such as Paypal
Business Intelligence
Along with integrating third-party applications, the Magento platform now offers its own native Business Intelligence tool. It links up with your various sources of data—Google Analytics, social media, sales data, etc.—and enables you to view all this together, rather than separately.
It syncs together the data you had already been gathering and brings it into one, easy-to-use system. Overall, this will save your team’s time spent wading through spreadsheets by carrying out advanced analyses and presenting these results in easy to understand ways. The comprehensive overview tools enable you to view high level reports with ease, while also enabling your team to dive deep into the nitty gritty to view results of individual campaigns or programs.
You can’t do well in any video game without a proper progress bar for your stats. You need to know where to upgrade your character as you level up. With Magento’s BI tools, you’ll be much better equipped to know where the most optimal use of your budget and hours is.
The Community
Any great game has a thriving online community full of people sharing tips and tricks, and so too does Magento. Certainly most of the big eCommerce platforms have online tips and forum boards, but Magento has a vibrant and active community. Precisely because it is an open source platform and customizable, developers, web design professionals, agencies, and consultants all eagerly want to share their innovations and creations with others.
Sure, your customers will be able to use a specific tool you’ve built, but they only get the front-end user experience. If you build something really fun or in a creative way, you’ll want to share it with the world and get their feedback. Others might even have input on how to improve the feature, so it opens up the ability to crowd-source improvements. Over time, this builds an incredible wealth of information and expands the resources available for Magento users beyond what the company alone can provide.
So you played GTA as Mario characters, but had you considered giving them jetpacks too? This is the type of result you can get when you have a bustling community of Magento developers all working together to improve functionality and user experience within a constantly shifting landscape.
Already Changing the Game
As you can see from all these great features, there are countless reasons why Magento Commerce is in a league of its own. The platform has already changed the landscape, and, like GTA, will change the expectations and status quo of eCommerce. Rather than all talk, here are some facts and figures to show you how Magento Commerce already is revolutionizing the eCommerce industry.
The Fastest Developing eCommerce Platform
Between 2017 and 2018 the number of Magento companies across the web doubled! Given how many options there are in the world of eCommerce, this goes to show that Magento’s advantages are not being ignored by the online business owners.
In 2018, Magento had 12% of the market share of the top 1 million eCommerce sites. As of 2019, the web development company has continued to grow and now has nearly 25%. WooCommerce still reigns as king in terms of numbers, but Magento ecommerce development is taking up a larger and larger portion of the online web page real estate over time.
The Big Names
A powerful tool like this is certain to attract some big names to it. Currently companies like Nike, Adidas, Nestle, Christian Louboutin and many others use Magento Commerce to power their online stores.
Magento Companies Grow Faster
There is a statistic showing that companies that use Magento tend to grow faster than those on other platforms. This cannot necessarily be attributed to the platform itself, rather to the mindset of business store owners who choose to use the advantages of Magento Commerce to power their eCommerce site in the first place.
Those who want an out-of-the-box basic setup for their digital storefront tend to be ok with a platform that looks and feels like the status quo. WooCommerce and Shopify sites have a standard template look and feel to them, which is familiar to customers, but not memorable or unique.
Magento users, on the other hand, go for the road less traveled. They specifically don’t want to use a cookie-cutter template for their stores and want to be more in control of their own platforms. These business owners are willing to make more of an investment in their eCommerce platform, spend more time and money at the beginning to ensure they have the flexibility they need down the road. They are willing to take on more risk from the get-go.
This translates into how they run their companies as well. Those who are willing to take chances are able to stand apart from the crowd and generally experience more growth in a shorter period of time.
Are You Ready to Change the Game?
There are a million repetitive app games like Candy Crush and Bejeweled out there. They’re fun and make waiting for the bus much more pleasant, but they don’t necessarily fulfill all your needs. Sometimes you just want to scale a mountain on your motorcycle, doing wheelies the whole time, then jump off the top with a parachute.
This is exactly what makes GTA fun. This is what makes setting up your own, tailor-made eCommerce sight rewarding too.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.