The growth of Magento as a powerful eCommerce platform continues apace, as businesses are waking up to its advantages. It powers around 8% of the world’s eCommerce sites, which might not sound like a huge number until you look at the amount of competition – it’s a highly competitive market with lots of players.
It’s not difficult to see why small eCommerce startups choose not to use the platform, however. After all, it’s pretty straightforward to set up a store on Shopify or Etsy, or build a simple website with a manual sales process if you’re selling in small volumes. Your initial investment is close to zero, as you’re really just taking services off the peg and paying for hosting as a percentage of sales and any monthly fees. It lets you concentrate on creating or sourcing products and marketing them.
But if you’re pondering a move to Magento but just need a push over the line, here are five very good reasons to go for it.
1. It’s all yours
While it’s convenient to have an accessible channel to sell your wares on, you’re ceding control of your hosting, themes and plugins to a third party. That’s not to say the mainstream services are slouches, but it’s ultimately a very important part of your business that you have no control over. Also, if they decide to put their rates up or change their terms of service, they can.
Magento is hosted on your own servers, or the servers of your hosting partner. That gives you 100% control over everything from the add-ons that you use to the hosting package you opt for. You only have to pay for the things you use.
2. There’s a great community
Problems are not problems for long when you’ve got an army of fellow users to refer to. You might be asking direct questions on one of the many forums dedicated to Magento, or looking through other users’ issues to get to the bottom of yours.
Also, because Magento is so popular, there’s a huge number of Magento developers who you can partner with for all aspects of site build and maintenance.
3. Thousands of extensions and themes
Another benefit of having a large usership is that theme and plugin developers will devote their best work to the platform. Whatever kind of eCommerce store you have, from a high volume, low cost operation to selling prestige items, you’ll find dozens of customisable themes to fit your niche.
4. Mobile friendliness
Magento 2 has responsiveness built into it, so you don’t have to worry about the millions of customers who never touch a manual keyboard on a laptop or desktop computer. Being mobile-friendly is also vital for keeping your site visible through SEO, too. Google looks very kindly on sites that perform well on small screens and use low bandwidth.
5. Security
Finally, the security setup on Magento is renowned as one of the best in the business. When you’re dealing with customers’ bank and credit card details, as well as storing large amounts of personal information on them, this is absolutely non-negotiable. With Magento, you – and your customers – can rest assured.
