The last few years have shown real growth for “plug-and-play” ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Volusion, etc. However, for many store owners, merchants, and ecommerce developers, Magento remains the prime consideration for their net ecommerce project.

So what really makes Magento unique and the favorite of the ecommerce industry?

Let’s check out some facts that will help you understand why Magento is still considered an ecommerce giant in 2017.

Open Source

Magento is a free ecommerce platform released under Open Source License ver 3.0 and built using PHP and other open source tools. By using these technologies and remaining open source means that Magento as a platform has several distinct advantages over the competition. The Platform is highly adaptable and could be modified endlessly to exactly fit project requirements.

Using open source tools also means that the platform guarantees a robust performance and enhanced security for merchants and developers.

Custom Designed for Ecommerce

These days all major CMS’s including WordPress, Drupal and others offer ecommerce capabilities (right out of the box in some cases!), they are designed with an ecommerce-only approach.

Thus Magento powered ecommerce solutions offer a better experience to everyone from the developers to the store administrators to end users who come to shop at the storefront. Over years, Magento has evolved into a feature rich ecommerce solution that comes prepackaged with all the essential tools needed to build up an ecommerce web store.

The Magento Community

Where there is an open source app, there is a community!

Since Magento is a very popular open source ecommerce platform, there is a huge community of store owners, merchants, developers, designers, agencies, ecommerce consultants, tech solutions providers, and general end users around the globe who discuss everything Magento in great details. The community ensures that the platform remains up-to-date, fast, reliable, secure and free from bugs. The good thing about this community is the very welcoming nature that makes every newcomer feel right at home.

No Hosting Related Restrictions

Unlike Shopify and Volusion (the “made for ecommerce” platforms), Magento allows you to choose the hosting solution of your choice. This way you could select the best hosting solution provider that fits your requirements and your budget. Similarly, when it is time to migrate your store, there is no restrictions on when and where you could host your store.

Default Responsive Design

The share of mobile devices in global ecommerce transactions is rapidly growing and soon it will surpass all other device classes. Realizing this, Magento incorporates HTML5 capabilities, ensuring that the storefront has a responsive design that caters flawlessly to mobile devices. In addition, Magento offers features such as Griding, image scaling, AV capabilities, gesture controls, drag-and-drop, etc.

Third Party Components Integration

Third party plugins and extensions greatly ease out the lives of Magento store administrators and developers. Magento offers limitless and restriction free integration of all third party components, thereby shortening the development and deployment timeframes considerably.

The good thing is that many of these components are free to use. Others are available for just a couple of dollars.

With the help of extensible API in Magento, you can connect to any application or any plugin of your choice without any hurdles. Whether it’s a payment gateway, an analytics tool or shipping, and tracking method, you only need to find the best extension and plug it into your Magento store within no time.

Magento Extensions & Customization Options

Every industry has its own ecommerce store design conventions. What works for fashion & apparel may not work for a furniture retailer. Similarly size, scale of operations, customer support requirements, billing and delivery options, etc. pose various challenges in the ecommerce environment.

Magento is a highly customizable ecommerce platform. It allows you to develop incredible frontend user experiences by editing layouts and templates or add new colors and styles of your choice. Backend refinements can also be redesigned to fulfill business requirements by rewriting code, modifying events and grids.

One of the key points of interest for all Magento users is the vast marketplace of extensions and modules. Magento users can discover multiple extensions effortlessly to extend and customize their stores and distinguish their storefront from the competitors’ by utilizing different augmentations.

Fast & Scalable

When it comes to page load speed, Magento is a clear winner!

Slow loading online stores go down very quickly. In many cases, the loss from slow pages is permanent and greatly contributes to the demise of the business. Magento with high-end caching technologies such as the Cloudways Full Page Cache and other database optimization techniques such as Memcached and Redis speed up the stores considerably.

Magento is suitable for small to large (and even huge) ecommerce stores simply because it’s flexible enough to grow with your business. In fact, Magento might surprise you with its performance, stability, and reliability.

Multiple Stores

Many ecommerce platforms let you have a single store per account. With Magento, you can setup multiple stores that could be managed through a single backend. You can control stores’ inventory, orders, billing, customer information, using a single admin panel.

Each store can have different themes and templates associated with them. You can also assign a subdomain for individual stores. The ease of controlling all of the stores simultaneously through a single admin panel greatly simplifies management and administration of multi-stores that operate in a single or multiple categories.

Conclusion

Magneto offers a lot of functionalities that help developers create the perfect store for their clients. The tools ease out the problems of showcasing products, online transactions, discounts management to name a few areas where Magento outperforms the competition. However, keep in mind that Magento is not a plug and play ecommerce solution. It does require a level of development and store optimization expertise from developers and administrators.