With Magento, you gain open source technology, friendly SEO configuration, fully-scalable integrations, and many more benefits. Find out why, in spite of some concerns surrounding the acquisition by Adobe and dropping support for Magento 1, it is still a vital part of the eCommerce landscape.
A short history of Magento
Let’s start with the basics. What is Magento? Magento is the leading open-source platform for eCommerce. Created in 2008, the platform quickly gained popularity to become a global leader; it now supports over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume per year. Magento software has been implemented by major players like Coca Cola, Ford, Nike, HP, and Canon. Since 2015, eCommerce builders have been able to choose between Magento 1 and Magento 2, but from June 2020, Magento will drop support for Magento 1 and focus on the newer release enriched with the latest programming practices as the basis for future functions and development.
Magento belonged to its founder, Roy Robin, until it was acquired by eBay in June 2011. Four years later, eBay and PayPal broke away to become separate entities, meaning that Magento evolved into an independent company owned by Permira – a European private equity fund. Finally, in 2018, Adobe took over Magento.
Why did Adobe buy Magento?
Adobe could not offer a commerce platform operating in both the B2B and B2C, but the purchase of Magento gave them the missing piece of that puzzle. The integration of Magento with Adobe resulted in the nascent Adobe Commerce Cloud. This single platform serves B2B, B2C, and hybrid customers around the world. Adobe strives to create one place from which retailers can manage their whole eCommerce sites, from A to Z. From editing product photos with Adobe tools (Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom), through marketing activities and managing content, to results analytics with Adobe Analytics, the acquisition gives Adobe the opportunity to compete with Shopify and Salesforce as a full-service eCommerce provider. It will also help Magento develop in the enterprise market.
“Adobe and Magento share a vision for the future of digital experiences that brings together Adobe’s strength in content and data with Magento’s open commerce innovation. We’re excited to join Adobe and believe this will be a great opportunity for our customers, partners, and developer community” .
Mark Lavelle, CEO, Magento
Source: Adobe News
How much does it cost to build eCommerce with Magento?
You control the cost of your build. At this moment, retailers can choose between three options: Magento Open Source, Magento Commerce, and Adobe Commerce Cloud.
- The first edition is free to use and is dedicated to small and midsize business (SMB), generally companies with under 100 employees and with total annual revenue not exceeding $10M.
- The next two options are paid. The second option, Magento Commerce, is perfect for Middle-market companies, but there is nothing to prevent it from being used by small enterprises or even SMBs.
- Last but not least, Adobe Commerce Cloud, which is the most expensive option, is aimed at small and large enterprises (with over 1000 employees and >$100M revenue). ACC is a cloud-based version of the Magento platform. It is integrated with Adobe tools like Analytics Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Advertising Cloud. Both enterprise versions are solutions for mature eCommerce.
Why use Magento?
First of all, it is a platform that will give you a lot of control over your eCommerce website. Magento provides freedom of action both in the backend and frontend. eCommerce owners to easily make functionality and design changes.
The popularity of Magento also guarantees a level of security and support that smaller platforms cannot match, which is why many security-conscious businesses use Magento.
Magento is also a platform of choice for large companies… although not all started as big players, they built their empires on the platform and later became high-turnover industry leaders. This scalability is vital for any ambitious business.
So why is one of the best-known and most trusted platforms in the eCommerce world experiencing a drop in popularity of recent months?
One of the main reasons is that Adobe announced that support for Magento 1 would end in June 2020. Magento 1 users are faced with the decision to migrate to Magento 2 or choose an alternative platform for the future. The acquisition of Magento by Adobe has also raised some doubts about the future direction of the platform—especially if it will stick to its open-source principles. However, both Magento and Adobe have a strong market position and a proven history, so while some may choose to look for alternatives in the current time of uncertainty, the passage of time should allay any fears, and that is true whether you are building a small business solution or upgrading to an enterprise version of Magento.
What are the advantages of Magento eCommerce platform?
The decision to choose the right eCommerce platform for your company can be tough. Magento offers a wide range of benefits. Here are just a few which should be front-of-mind when you make your decision.
1. Open-Source & Free
Open source technology built using PHP gives Magento users the ability to create an eCommerce website for free. PHP may not sound like the most exciting programming language for cutting-edge developers, but it has a great number of advantages; it is stable, well-documented, and used by a massive community. Developers from around the world can modify, improve, and develop the software and Magento lets you gain complete control over the functions in the online channel. You’ll also be able to use a library of extensions made by the community.
As I mentioned earlier, there are also two paid options: Magento Commerce and the recently-created Adobe Commerce Cloud. The platform allows you to create and manage many eCommerce stores with one instance of Magento Commerce (in many languages and using many currencies).
2. Magento Marketplace
Magento Marketplace offers a large base of curated extensions, themes, and partners providing new functionalities; you can cherry-pick the services from several categories that perfectly fit your business. Honestly speaking, there are some top quality extensions and some that are not so impressive; to get the best ones for your business, you should do some research. Many websites, such as Sumo and Cloudways, offer a comprehensive list of top Magento themes and extensions. Verify extensions before you implement them.
3. SEO Friendly
Search Engine Optimization is essential for creating a successful and effective website. Without it, it is impossible to rank highly in Google and drive organic traffic to your store from keyword searches. Magento software offers a lot of SEO features for store owners to use in the dashboard while creating products, which help sites and individual offers rank higher, from URL structure to unique meta tags and descriptions.
4. Powerful Community
Magento called them an Army of Innovators. One thing is certain: the main reason for Magento’s elevated position is its Community (yes, with capital C). It brings together Magento enthusiasts from around the world. Programmers, developers, PMs, CEOs, and bloggers share their tips and knowledge every day, creating a thought-leadership base of best practices, business innovation, and hard coding tips.
5. Strong Support
Choosing Magento means you’ll never have to go it alone again ;). Support is an integral part of Magento (as well as being the foundation of every self-respecting company). Such a large platform as Magento has to place a heavy emphasis on supporting clients and the technical support team is of crucial importance, not just as a team that put out fires but as an integral part of the business ethos. The Magento community and developers are constantly helping to improve the platform by introducing newer and better standards. In the past, there were some concerns about standards—especially as the platform grew almost exponentially—but the community has made an extra effort to improve the quality of code and documentation, as well as providing an appropriate level of service.
6. Flexible and Scalable Software
Magento is a fully-scalable eCommerce platform with a wide feature set. Access to the code allows for complete control over all functionalities and lets store owners create and share their own custom functions, as well as customizing existing ones. Easy-to-use features help eliminate poor designs and allow the creation of sites with a better quality of user experience. UX is a crucial element of the customers’ journey: it pushes up conversion rates, decreases bounce rates, and offers positive experiences that encourage shoppers to return to your store again and again.
7. Fast & Easy Integrations
Magento allows builders to connect eCommerce websites with third-party services such as transportation and shipping, order tracking, and payment gateways. You can easily integrate with eBay, Paypal, Mail Chimp, Google Shopping, or QuickBooks, as well as using Google Analytics to harness data and constantly improve your store.
8. Add any feature imaginable
Choosing the right eCommerce for your business is not easy as the choice of platforms continues to expand. There are various smaller, newer eCommerce platforms on the market, which may be more appropriate for your business model now. However, you need to consider if you can expand your basic feature set into a fully-integrated eCommerce ecosystem. Essentially, with the third-party integrations marketplace for Magento, you can add ANY feature in the world, including payment gateways, metrics, AI tools, voice commerce. New, competing platforms may be based on modern and cool technology, and the basic eCommerce offer is often cheaper, but they can’t match the feature set of Magento’s advanced plug-ins and integrations ecosystem.
9. Guaranteed, dedicated development teams
There is another issue with choosing a smaller platform, especially one that is using only nascent technologies and is not well known in the wider eCommerce world. How do you find a software house that specializes in that technology? Magento software houses can be found the world over. It is a buyer’s market, and you will always find a development team to build your Magento solution. Many smaller platforms do offer great technological solutions, but without an extended partnership network, you may find yourself with a chosen platform but nobody willing and able to build it for you.
10. Beloved product merchandising
Shopify is a big rival to Magento but it has one major drawback: the product catalog and merchandising in Shopify is not as flexible. It has very limited attributes, variants and product bundles in comparison to Magento. Whatever you sell, you can make the Magento merchandising engine work for your products.
Top brands that use Magento
About 1% of the Internet uses Magento. At first glance, it’s not all that impressive. But when we consider that there are around 1.5 billion online websites, that 1% takes on a new significance.
According to the research provided by SimilarTech, Magento is in the Top 5 eCommerce Platforms. We have compiled a shortlist of top eCommerce sites based on the Magento platform, ranked by the number of monthly visits:
- www.g2a.com 21.90M
- www.shop.huawei.ru 15.10M
- www.saraiva.com.br 12.90M
- www.hpshopping.in 12.40M
- www.acer.com 11.70M
- www.castorama.pl 10.60M
- www.cdkeys.com 10.30M
- www.kinguin.net 9.46M
- www.eobuwie.com.pl 9.07M
- www.reserved.com 8.74M
(data may vary depending on the tool used)
Over 250,000 active sites use Magento. You can view the Top 50 here.
Winning Magento implementations built by Divante
PCC Group is a European Chemistry corporation with branches in 17 countries. With its main headquarters in Duisburg, Germany, the company operates over 39 sites. As a result, we built a B2B2C eCommerce platform for the B2B network of sales enriched by multi-store capacity, several language versions, and an extension to the customer panel with the possibility of settling commission.
Creating a worldwide platform was vital for Senetic, an international provider of IT solutions. The company has been in business for ten years and annually serves over 2 million customers from all over the world. Magento 2 was the perfect choice for the company, which required a flexible and reliable platform to manage its business. In a year, we developed over 20 websites on one instance of Magento. As a PIM system, we implemented Akeneo.
One of the biggest projects that we developed was for TIM, the largest electro-technical goods distributor in Europe. Multiple integrations including CRM, ERP, and WMS translated into a 78% increase in online sales. After almost ten years of collaboration, we have helped them grow into an effective B2B platform with 100M € revenue from online sales.
What’s the future of Magento?
Mobile Commerce is still growing and shows no signs of stopping. Magento’s PWA Studio and the Progressive Web Apps technology are an answer to these trends.
“While existing technologies have long supported mobile interactions, Progressive Web Apps are poised to radically evolve how consumers utilize their mobile devices. Promising a powerful, app-like browsing experience, this emergent technology is set to blow away the experiential demands of today’s tech-savvy shopper.”
Source: Magento Products
With the increasing impact of mobile devices, the expectations of mobile customers are growing. Although PWA has been a known technology since 2007, it has only gained popularity relatively recently and has come to be seen as a way of meeting the needs of mobile device users. The PWA Studio, therefore, seems like an astute move. It is a set of tools that enable the creation of online stores as Progressive Web Apps. Developers can build a complex app from scratch based on Magento 2, allowing programmers to build a PWA quickly and efficiently.
What if I don’t want to use PWA Studio by Magento? No problem, there are many PWA solutions available for eCommerce out there. One of them is Vue Storefront. Maybe you’ve heard of it?
Why use Vue Storefront if there is PWA Studio by Magento?
Vue Storefront is a progressive web app; a standalone solution compatible with any eCommerce (not only Magento). Vue Storefront works as a headless frontend; connected to any eCommerce, it provides all the benefits of PWA. One great benefit of VS is its community. Just like the Magento Community, Vue Storefront has a massive impact on product development. By creating more plugins, developers contribute to improving and extending functionality. The community plays a significant role, but these are not the only benefits of VS. Find out about Vue Storefront and its extended feature set here.
Do not opt for the native app. Go for PWA. Especially when you have an online store on Magento or are planning to start your business. Today, connecting your platform with Progressive Web App is simple. If you are interested in exploring further, find out how we combine them in this article: PWA for Magento.
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