eCommerce Marathon | Part 3 | Magento

The last 2 weeks have been full of great news, including successful application into the FCA Regulatory Sandbox and a successful seed round. Long ago, we openly announced our intentions to enhance our current online tools with additional modules regularly. Magento e-commerce platform is one such handy tool that can be used by small and medium-sized businesses when migrating to digital sales channels.

Magento is one of the top-notch platforms for e-commerce websites. Numerous businesses have enjoyed its helpfulness, usefulness and benefits. In a recent study, BuiltWith pointed out that Magento is the most common platform used for e-commerce. It tops the other platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and BigCommerce. This platform has popularly been used in the UK, Netherlands, and the US. Globally, it is as well recognized as one of the best CMS and hosting for businesses. Magento was acquired by Abobe Inc in May 2018 for $1.68 Billion, thus, due to the scale, allows to Create engaging, shoppable experiences with Magento.

Let’s examine how the next-generation technology, global partner ecosystem, and extensions marketplace can breathe life into your business.

Who is it for?

Many small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) use WordPress for their eCommerce needs, simply because it’s very easy and is available for free. However, Magento does provide these businesses with several benefits that may make it a better fit, especially if you’re looking for a pure eCommerce system and not a content management system. WordPress was designed as the latter, which makes it great for creating a full website with features such as a blog, but it’s not as powerful as Magento for eCommerce.

Whatever your commerce objectives, Magento has you covered. Enjoy rich, out-of-the-box features, an unlimited ability to customize, and seamless third-party integrations that address the unique needs of your business, across any industry. With Magento, you’re supported by a global ecosystem of merchants, partners, and developers, who will bring your commerce vision to life and offer eCommerce solutions for every need. Here are a few ways SMB can benefit from Magento.

Magento is omnichannel. Just like JO1N!

A Better In-Store Experience Increases both Loyalty and Sales (pssst, this is something we thought off too, when building our JO1N omnichannel proposition 🥰)

• Omnichannel is a Business Imperative to Stay Competitive
• Order Management for Omnichannel Experiences 

Grow Your Business with Flexible Order Fulfilment More fulfilment options mean more sales. Reduce the operational cost of managing global inventory by turning your stores, suppliers, and partners into mini distribution centres.

Deliver meaningful commerce experiences

• No limits. No compromises. Whatever your business need or industry, combined with JO1N, we’ve got you covered. From affordable monthly subscriptions for small business to enterprise-grade capabilities built for global expansion and growth, Magento delivers the power of Magento is an all-in-one solution that is scalable, affordable, and endlessly customizable.

• Affordable. Cloud hosting eliminates the costs of maintaining, monitoring and hosting an eCommerce solution yourself, thereby reducing your total cost of ownership. A monthly subscription fee gives you a solution you can budget for, a bit pricey though… And when you need to add new capabilities, thousands of affordable extensions are available from their official Marketplace.
• Limitless. Magento is an endlessly customizable platform that evolves with you as your site traffic increases, and as you grow to multiple stores, brands, channels or product configurations. You’ll also benefit from built-in global support, so you can easily transact in multiple countries.

• Trusted. Magento sets the standard for secure commerce solutions and is trusted by the world’s fastest-growing eCommerce merchant base, expected to drive $185B in gross merchandise volume in 2021.
• Omnichannel. Retailers have addressed the many ways shoppers can buy from them by launching multiple channels, then improving the experience in each. But this does not reflect how people shop today – they want to buy what they want, from wherever they want, at a competitive price, with fast delivery. Omnichannel business is no longer an option, it’s a business imperative. 🚀 Magento offers the right products, services, and partners to help you achieve omnichannel success.
• Mobile Commerce. By the end of 2021, it’s estimated that almost 50% of online sales will come from mobile and in some markets that number is already over 80%. Having a fast and affordable way to create a mobile-ready site is critical for growth. The future is mobile and Magento helps businesses build the foundation for that future. The mobile web pages have to be optimized for easy navigation by the users to find what they are looking for. Magento helps to create mobile-friendly web pages that work seamlessly across all smartphones, tablets and handheld devices.

• Developer friendly. Every website owner wants the website to be different from the others. Hence with Magento, developers can easily customize the page, content and navigation according to their own needs. The linking of pages is also made very easy which saves time for the developers.
• SEO. Magento has a unique feature that takes care of multiple issues that may affect the SEO of your eCommerce website. When you use this feature, the eCommerce site will be optimized for all the landing pages, any duplicate content, indexing and various other important factors that may influence the SEO positively.
• Fast loading web pages. Do you know that 47% of users in eCommerce websites expect their web pages to load in 2 seconds or less? 40% of users even abandon their websites if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Hence the loading speed of the web page is instrumental to get more leads and sales. Magento understands the importance of the web page loading time and provides one of the faster loading web pages, optimized to decrease the loading time as much as possible.
• Varied hosting options. Magento is not bound to use one hosting provider. It resides with the individual to choose any hosting provider for their website and Magento works effectively across all hosting platforms.

Disadvantages of Magento

Heavy loads may cause possible trouble. As Magento is run on PHP, one of the possible setbacks is heavy loading. There are instances that it takes time to load a product page and once it happens it decreases the credibility factor of the site.

Magento is a bit expensive. If you’re just a start-up, purchasing Magento can’t be a practical solution. Why? It is a little pricey. The costly expense may include maintenance, functionalities, updates, and plugins. The recommended enterprise edition is so costly, plus the fact that it is coupled with expensive license fees. You also need to pay an expert, if you’re not a “tech wiz” yourself, to install and set up the additional plugins and functionalities.

Using Magento is resource-intensive. This platform has been tested as robust and scalable. But it requires heavy-duty servers to make sure that it runs well. It requires intensive data storage capacity to optimize its performance. But this platform assures that once you meet this requirement, the monetary, resource-based, and time investments will become profitable.

Pricing

Magento is an open-source platform that, like WordPress, is free to install. However, you’ll need to pay for web hosting (around $10 per month), security, and extensions. This will eventually increase the price to the level of competitors, such as Shopify, Instacart or even more.

Summary

Create an eCommerce website backed by powerful tools like Magento, bring your business online and it will help you manage your day-to-day, find customers and drive sales.

Magento offers lots of customisation options and is easy to manage on your own. Its unique features could be incorporated into an application or website in significantly less time compared to that on other platforms. Think of JO1N payment gateway integration; an experienced programmer is capable of completing the process in less than 2 hours.

To learn more about JO1N x Magento module integration, feel free to read our other articles and Magento installation guide.

See you in the next blog post.

Stay tuned! 🚀👩🏽‍🚀