Getting Started With Magento Ecommerce Platform

Magento is an open-source ecommerce platform to run an online store. You get a range of tools to manage & sell products. It is a one-stop solution to all ecommerce store requirements. Magento offers two main editions for merchants:

Magento Open Source is the free Magento edition used by the majority of sellers. It comes with extensive features & functions. You can customize your store & add third-party modules. It is suitable for all ecommerce business sizes.

Adobe Commerce is the paid Magento edition, mainly focused on large-scale ecommerce stores. It offers advanced Business Intelligence. The edition starts from 22,000 dollars per year. The Adobe Commerce Cloud pricing starts at 40,000 dollars per year. You get a cloud-hosted solution with the platform.

Why use Magento?

It has a flexible model to make store changes. You work on an intuitive interface. The platform has been around for more than a decade. With the Magento 2 version released in 2015, it has gotten significant upgrades. The key features of Magento 2 include:

• B2C & B2B Commerce Tools
• Managing content
• Merchandise
• Business Intelligence
• Order & Inventory Managing
• Promotions & Coupons
• Responsive Themes
• Global Currencies & tax support

Magento ecommerce development has an extensive list of features that covers everything. You have all the tools natively to sell your products.

Top Benefits of using Magento are

Grow your Magento store with the latest technologies such as:

• Headless Commerce
• PWA Studio
• Mobile Commerce
• B2B Commerce
• ERP Function
• Amazon Sales Channel
• Open-Source – You can modify the source code. Add plugins for more functions.
• Scale Globally – Scale to new regions & create multiple stores, get built-in languages & currencies features, global support for payments & shipping.
• User-friendly – Navigate easily for both the website & admin panel. Admin dashboard gives complete control over the store functions.
• Omnichannel – Extend your store to mobile selling. Add IoT channels and social media.
• SEO – Advanced SEO features are built-in.
• Analytics & reporting – Dynamic reports for orders and products. Get customer data on one platform.
• Third-party extensions – Create a custom store based on customer demands. Add a range of third-party plugins.

Magento Pros and Cons

Pros

• High Flexibility & Customisation
• Built-in Features & Functionality
• Advanced SEO
• Mobile-friendly & Omnichannel Support
• Large Community Support
• Scalable & a Global Platform
• GDPR & Other Compliance Laws

Cons

• Technical Support for Customising
• Costs
• Scarcity of developers
• Time-consuming
• Need for super powerful hosting

Features in Magento Ecommerce Platform

Magento General Feature List

Marketing, Promotions and Conversion Tools

• Related products, up-sells and cross-sells 
• Catalog promotional pricing with the ability to restrict to stores, categories or products 
• Flexible coupons (pricing rules) with ability to restrict to stores, customer groups, time period, products, and categories 
• Generate a set of unique coupon codes for each promotion and export the list of codes for offline distribution, email, newsletters and more. Easily manage and monitor coupon usage and generate detailed reports 
• Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts 
• Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) 
• Landing page for categories 
• Customer groups 
• Product bundles 
• Recently viewed and compared products 
• New items promotional tool 
•  Persistent shopping cart 
• Free shipping options 
• Polls 
• Newsletter management 
• Send to a friend for all visitors or registered users only 
• Send wish lists by email

Search Engine Optimization

• 100% search engine friendly 
• Google Site Map 
• Search engine friendly URL’s 
• URL rewrites give full control of URL’s
• Meta-information for products, categories and content pages 
• Auto-generated site map for display on site 
• Auto-generated popular search terms page 
• Google Content API for shopping

Customer Segmentation, Targeted Promotions & Merchandising

• Dynamic Rule Based Product Relations
• Persistent Shopping
• Automated Email Marketing Reminder
• Private Sales
• Gift Registry
• Gifting Options
• Rewards Points
• Store Credits
• Multiple Wish Lists
• Add to Cart by SKU
• Return Management Authorization (RMA)
• Scheduled Import/Export Functionality
• Staging, Merging and Rollback of Content
• Administrator Permission Roles on Website and Store Levels

5 Examples of Magento Sites

• kitkatchocolatory.com.br
• infuseclean.com
• zenith-watches.com
• cervelo.com
• cokestore.com

Magento Themes Available

• Porto – Ultimate Responsive Magento Theme
• Ultimo – Fluid Responsive Magento Theme
• Fastest – Magento Multipurpose Responsive Theme
• Market – Premium Responsive Magento Theme
• Novetty – Fastest Magento 2 Theme
• Athlete – Fluid Responsive Magento Theme
• UB TREX PRO by Uber Themes

The post Unlocking Success with Magento: Your Ultimate Ecommerce Guide appeared first on Digital Gravity.

Other than a flexible shopping cart system, you’ll find amazing tools such as catalogue management, digital marketing, social media handles, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and more. Easy scalability and robust security are added pros that makes Magento a more preferable platform for creating super amazing digital shops and stores. 

Magento is currently available in two different editions namely The Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce respectively. Of the both, Magento Commerce 2 releases offer many different advanced features, greater performance, scalability, data order management and checkout system. Dozens of plugins, extensions and features are also added to the new version with cloud hosting and 24/7 customer support.

Magento 2 Commerce Stand-Out Features

What sets apart Magento 2 Commerce is its features that you won’t find in previous releases. Have a look below at some of the pretty amazing Magento development that resulted in the Commerce 2 platform and provided below is the information to learn about it all!

Category Permissions

Using this function, merchants can limit user access to browsing categories, view cost, and add particular products to cart based on customer/buyer preference.

Gift Cards

Store owners, operators or merchants can sell both physical and virtual gift cards online as well as manage a record of issued gift cards. Access to the function is provided within the Magento admin dashboard.

Advanced Catalogue Search

Yet another super amazing feature is Elasticsearch; a highly scalable and robust distributed search engine used by leading brands and websites such as Wikipedia, GitHub and eBay to name a few.

Dynamic Blocks

In the Magento 2 Commerce, the banner option has been removed and replaced by Dynamic Blocks which serves as a whole new function. It lets merchants create interactive, rich and logical content based on rules of cost and as per customer segmentation. The distinguishing features are cycles of rotating dynamic blocks that are displayed either in a sequence or random order which enable creating slide-show campaigns. You’re unlikely to find the traditional static or CMS blocks as well as carousels.

Staging of the Content

Applying new changes to the content with the ability to create, preview and even auto-schedule updates for product, promotions, categories, CMS-pages and blocks, widgets and more. This may be quite helpful to schedule on-site or on-page digital marketing campaigns for new products or services to be launched or published online at a specific time. 

This comes in real handy especially when the deadline is over the weekends, holidays or at night time when managing things manually is challenging. All of it can be managed from the Staging Dashboard which automatically schedules, activates and updates on the campaigns in the pipeline.

Page Hierarchy

Organizing content according to their pages while managing add-on functionalities such as introducing pagination, navigation and menus with easy drag-and-drop can be done in Magento 2 commerce.

Customer Segmentation

Displaying content dynamically such as banners, promotions so on to particular customers based on demographic, preferences, buying history, content in the shopping cart and more can be managed as well.

Information can be segmented with the latest updates appearing on top which helps customers to shop conveniently and get the best out of online shopping stores built on Magento Commerce 2 platform. It also enables merchants to execute highly-targeted campaigns based on buyer/customer activity. Data exporting for external use is also available.

Set Email Reminders

Auto management of emails is another possibility that can be enabled through Email Reminders. The dashboard can automatically send emails to customers based on their shopping cart, buying preference or wishlist. The purpose is to retain customers and encourage them in making a purchase through the website. The emails can be set based on days, timing, item quantity, abandoned cart, order cancellation as well as new arrival.

Gift Registries

Customers can pre-register their items for special occasions through the Gift Registries as well as invite friends, family in purchasing the gifts using the Magento’s Gift Registry Search Widget. Magento keeps a close and accurate track of all items purchased from the order registry and even the remaining quantities.

Google Tag Manager

Merchants can manage code snippets or JavaScript ‘pixels’ using the Google Tag Manager. It also helps in keeping track of customer activities, target them using personalized content, measure engagement, retarget and even execute outbound marketing activities. What’s worth noting is that both Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics Enhanced Ecommerce is supported natively only in the Magento Commerce edition.

Private Sales & Events

Merchants are able to create and host exclusive sales events for customers. Another option is configuring events and making them accessible only to customers that log-in using their unique IDs. These events are, however, time-bound whereas the Event Ticker runs a countdown as to when it’ll end or closes. Customers are also provided the option to send invitations to other users while Private Sales Reports can display information on total invitations dispatched, discarded, accepted as well as conversion rate for each event.

These are only a few unique features to come with the Magento 2 Commerce platform. Some of the best ecommerce development companies in Dubai and worldwide are actively developing as well as managing full-fledged online stores and brands using the platform.

You can also learn about all the latest developments in the world of ecommerce by reading our post on Modern Ecommerce Development In a Nutshell [UAE Guide].

The post Magento Commerce 2: In-depth Guide appeared first on Digital Gravity.