It’s almost one year ago to the day that I updated the great-save.com domain to point at our new Magento Community Edition (CE) powered website. In those 12 months I’ve become very passionate about this ecommerce solution and learnt a huge amount about the key strengths of the open source platform.
So here are my 7 great reasons why you should seriously consider Magento as your next ecommerce platform:
1. Multiple stores - Whether you want one single ecommerce shop or to migrate a handful of shops to Magento, the platform has the capability to meet your needs. The creation of new stores is made extremely easy and can all be carried out in the back-end of Magento. A single Magento installation can happily have multiple stores using different domain names, different IP’s and different security certificates. Find out more in the Knowledge base article How Multiple Websites & Stores Work
2. A/B testing – Magento’s integration with Google Website Optimizer gives you a powerful, easy-to-use tool for driving sales online. Google’s Website Optimizer is a popular free tool that helps website owners dramatically improve conversion rates by conducting A/B testing and multivariate testing of their website content and layout. Net Sales Trainer (Membership required) have a great How To video for setting this up.
3. Guest Checkout – The word Registration can send fear into even the most experienced online shopper. Magento avoids this issue by offering the shopper the option of making a purchase as a Guest. By obtaining the essential customer, payment and delivery information it makes for a quick and easy checkout experience. This Magento screencast walks you through the Guest Checkout.
4. Expandable – Magento Connect is to Magento what the iTunes App Store is to the iPhone. The variety and quality of extensions is excellent and following a recent revamp it’s now even easier to find the right extension for your needs. Pricing for extensions does vary, but the detailed information, customer reviews and support forums give you all the information you should need on whether your buying the correct add-on to your ecommerce store.
5. Numbers – Built into the back end are a really useful set of Reports, from Best Sellers to Search Terms it gives you a lot of the answers to common ecommerce reporting requirements. The other great ‘numbers’ related feature is the built-in support for Google Analytics. This is more than just your basic statistical reporting, it offers full ecommerce tracking for products and conversions as well.
6. Themes – Magento Themes are certainly not for the light-hearted, but once you have an understanding it does offer some amazing visual design and customisation options. To see some brilliant examples of what is possible with Magento take a look at the Magento Spotting section of their blog.
7. Online Support – Magento has become one of THE most talked about ecommerce solutions by creating and supporting their online community. This community has grown into a comprehensive support network through great forums, groups, IRC chat and even broadcasting a problem on twitter can usually get a prompt response.
Hopefully the 7 points above and links included within them will leave you more informed about Magento, but if you have any other questions or queries please do post a comment and I’ll do my best to answer them.
But how much of this do we get in the community edition? Multiple stores are in there? And A/B testing? Enterprise Edition is far too expensive for a shop just starting out…
I like Magento, but on the other hand, some of your reasons are also negative points in my opinion.
A/B testing is a good idea, but the GWO options are very limited in Magento. The number of ecommerce platforms that offer Google Website Optimizer integration is still low, but growing. I guess some integration is better than none.
Expandable via Magento Connect – imagine installing a handful of extensions, upgrading Magento, then having to face a broken website because one or more of the developers have not updated their extension yet. Big problem.
Same for themes. A lot of the themes look great and are extremely affordable, but with the speed of Magneto updates, even themes can break.
Online Support – While Magento is one of the most talked about ecommerce solutions out there, I don’t think I can agree that the official Magento forums are the best place to get answers about the Community Edition of Magento.
Multiple stores and A/B testing using Google Website Optimiser all come as standard in the Community Edition. The Enterprise Edition does have some great features, which make it worth the investment for the enterprise sized business: http://www.magentocommerce.com/product/enterprise-edition