Statistics already show that the e-commerce platform Magento is a way ahead of other platforms with a market share of 26 percent. This certainly speaks volume of its wide acceptance among e-commerce retailers across the world. Moreover, with global e-commerce sales soon going to surpass the mark of 3.5 trillion dollars by 2020 as reported by research firm eMarketer, Magento has emerged as the sunshine in the lives of both established and aspiring e-commerce retailers.
The dazzling features of the open source platform have, of course, a lot to do with its massive popularity. The recent Magento 2.0 update has further enhanced its usability and functionality to an unprecedented extent. So let us have a quick look at the features of Magento 2.0 that make it so alluring for the retailers in the e-commerce business.
Reduced checkout steps – Magento 2.0 deters shopping cart abandonment to a considerable extent by reducing its checkout steps from five in Magento 1.0 to just two. For long, retailers have struggled to put a check on the cart abandonment rate, which is at present more than 70 percent and Magento 2.0 has overcome this persistent problem with its reduced checkout steps.
Most shoppers choose to stop when they are requested to create an account while checking out. The new feature in Magento 2.0 takes care of this aspect and allows the shoppers to checkout in a hassle-free manner as a guest.
Database Scalability – There is no denial in the fact that Magneto 1.0 was awesome but Magento 2.0 Enterprise enables e-commerce retailers to separate databases as per the requirement. As soon as someone adds a product to the shopping cart, it is possible to separate the database so that the speed does turn slow due to visitors who are just browsing the store randomly.
One can use the latest version to easily customise a Magento store involving multiple databases, which was not possible with its predecessor. This makes a big difference for the owners of large e-stores where shoppers add over 5000 products to the cart on a daily basis. The feature has improved the speed of the store substantially, which is essential to have success in the world of e-commerce.
Responsiveness – With an increased use of mobile devices to search a product or to place an order, it is evident to all e-commerce retailers that if they are not able to display their store aesthetically on varied mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets or iPhones, they are losing a huge chunk of potential customers. Magento 2.0 comes handy on this front with its responsive design in eye-catching colors. Thus, it makes the store attractive and reachable to all.
Exceptional security – Magento released security updates to fix issues in a continual manner and recently, it has released Magento 2.0.4 security update. This eliminates any fear of cyber attack on a Magento store. Moreover, it is secure with a PA-DSS certification, encryption by AES-256 as well as robust hashing.
Amazing performance – Magento 2.0 has great compatibility with fast caching reverse proxy Varnish 4 and the Hip Hop Virtual Machine. Both of these ensure that an e-store powered by Magento 2.0 loads super fast, and does not give a chance to switch to any competitor’s store because of any delay by even a fraction of a second.
If these are not enough, Magento store also offers an intuitive page editor that allows retailers to add content or products anytime. It offers an advanced SEO facility, multiple shipping options, seamless site management, support for multiple payment gateways and can be easily integrated with a vast range of business apps as per the need. The zero scarcity of experienced Magento e-commerce developers has further made it quite favourable for e-commerce.
A brief comparison of Magento 2.0 with other popular e-commerce platforms
Magento 2.0 has a couple of advantages over other popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify or Volusion. While others are also good to foray into the business of e-commerce, Magento 2.0 has an upper hand. It is an open sourced one, which means more affordability. Furthermore, the fact that paid themes in the case of Magento are unbelievably available at a small price as low as only one dollar. This makes it a preferred choice over Shopify and Volusion in which the rate of paid themes start at a whopping 80 dollars! All this shows that Magento store allows you to have an eye-catching store design without spending a fortune, which proves extremely beneficial for small retailers.
You also need third-party apps to have multi-lingual support for your e-store, which is a built-in feature in case of Magento. For any retailer, choosing a platform that offers extensibility is of paramount importance and Magento 2.0 fits the bill perfectly. Yes, Volusion has over 76 apps to offer store extensibility sounding impressive. But here is the catch! Magento 2.0 has multiple extensions installed on the server and thus provides a retailer ample chance to extend the online store seamlessly.
In a similar manner, the platform has an edge over other popular platforms too like Woocommerce, Opencart, Zen Cart, Prestashop, and much more. Apart from all these, Magento 2.0 also has an attractive enterprise cloud edition that leverages the power of cloud computing. Moreover, if you have an existing store in Magento 1.0, you can easily migrate to Magento 2.0 to avail all its bright features by hiring professional Magento development services.
Indeed, Magento 2.0 is the sunshine in the lives of e-commerce retailers. It will continue to remain the same until some innovative platform hits the market.
[…] version, Magento is nearly impervious to any security threats and works immaculately. Now, with the Magento 2.0 release out this year, the Community Edition has been further beefed up with better coding […]