E-commerce platform. Part 3. What is the secret of the popularity of Magento?
Hi, Habr!
In our past articles, we began to acquaint you with the largest and most popular e-commerce platforms. Now it's Magento's turn. Yet this is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. This platform has already been written and said so much that we can only try to explain the reasons for the popularity of Magento, as well as highlight the main nuances of working with this platform.
Well, let's start dating. First, a little history. Magento is developed by Varien, whose previous project was OsCommerce. Work on Magento was launched in early 2007, and after 7 months, in August, the beta version of the platform was released. The main developers were Americans Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. In 2010, eBay Inc. bought 49% stake in Magento for $ 22.5 million, and in 2011 Magento became fully owned by eBay Inc.
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Our next step in exploring Magento will be a review of the brands that have entrusted their online store to this platform. These are commerce bison like: Lenovo, Samsung, Gucci, Rebel8, Olympus, Skype, Swarovski and many others. You must admit that the names of the brands are impressive, and such companies cannot fall into the dirt with their faces by launching an online store that would not meet all their requirements and customer expectations. And if you look at the statistics of the site alexa.com, then we will see that Magento is the most popular e-commerce platform. Among the million most popular online stores, most are written in Magento. Such a popularity of the platform is explained by its diverse and rather wide opportunities, but let's not forget who the owner is, which gives an additional impetus to the success of Magento.
Fig. Graph of the popularity of e-commerce platforms for April 2014
Magento is an open source platform written in PHP. You can use both the free version of the platform and the paid ones: Enterprise version with enhanced functionality and support for your online store, or Magento Go, which works in the “cloud”. If you are faced with a choice between the Community and Enterprise versions, you first need to determine what goals you set for your online market. If your shop will attract no more than 1000 unique users per month, and the average monthly number of sales will be close to 100, then the Community version should be sufficiently functional. The Enterprise version, in turn, has the following advantages over the Community: the ability to organize gift certificates and cards; the possibility of customer segmentation, as well as the organization of closed sales of goods for certain groups of customers; included functionality for wholesalers and distributors; Magento Enterprise has the opportunity to encourage regular customers by awarding bonus points for purchases at your online store. As you can see, there are enough differences, but whether you need additional paid functionality is up to you.
And so, we turn to the advantages of this platform. One of the main advantages of Magento is its modular architecture. In practice, this means that you have a core of the platform around which, as the functionality needs expanding, modules are attached. You can find these extensions in Magento Connect, where there are both paid and free extensions for the online store. We also note the fact that for the community version the number of quality extensions, even free ones, is off scale in the market. Going to Magento Connect, we see that we have a very large selection of different extensions, for which we can sort them by popularity, platform, Community, Enterprise, Magento Go, which will be used for “extension”, as well as by price: free and paid.
Fig. Magento connect
Also a significant advantage when choosing Magento is a responsive web design supported by the platform, which comes in the boxed edition. That is, the site design on Magento will be conveniently viewed on devices with different resolutions and formats, without requiring the creation of certain types of site for various devices, be it smartphones, tablets or netbooks.
Fig. Mobile and standard version of the site swarovski.com
The next distinctive advantage of the Magento platform is the ability to create and then manage several online stores from a single entry point, which removes the need to work with several admin panels at the same time. Another important advantage of the platform is the ability to assign specific characteristics to a product, which are necessary only for this type of product, work with several currencies and, if necessary, convert them quickly.
Let's now get acquainted together with the appearance of the admin panel on the example of performing some tasks.
Fig. Manage Product List
Fig. Editing categories of groups of products through the admin interface
Fig. Editing statistical pages
Let us turn to the shortcomings of this platform. The first thing that comes to mind is the demands on resources, because for the good work of the production site you need a good server and high-quality hosting. The next disadvantage of developing an online site on this platform is the cost of developer services, if you need to implement custom functionality. Well, open PHP-code carries some problems, because unknowingly you can harm your store, rummaging where it is not necessary.
Well, it's time for conclusions. Magento is a good solution for your online store, which has been proven by many well-known brands. Wide functionality, intuitive interface, the ability to decide for yourself what extensions you need, the ability to integrate with third-party services, and all this is available to you even in the free Community version - these are the reasons to make a choice in favor. Magento. We also note that in Western countries, representatives of small and medium-sized businesses use the Magento platform. In the CIS countries, the situation is fundamentally different, because not every small business representative can afford to maintain an online store on Magento, so in these countries, the platform is mainly used by medium-sized businesses.
In our past articles, we began to acquaint you with the largest and most popular e-commerce platforms. Now it's Magento's turn. Yet this is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. This platform has already been written and said so much that we can only try to explain the reasons for the popularity of Magento, as well as highlight the main nuances of working with this platform.
Well, let's start dating. First, a little history. Magento is developed by Varien, whose previous project was OsCommerce. Work on Magento was launched in early 2007, and after 7 months, in August, the beta version of the platform was released. The main developers were Americans Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner. In 2010, eBay Inc. bought 49% stake in Magento for $ 22.5 million, and in 2011 Magento became fully owned by eBay Inc.
')
Our next step in exploring Magento will be a review of the brands that have entrusted their online store to this platform. These are commerce bison like: Lenovo, Samsung, Gucci, Rebel8, Olympus, Skype, Swarovski and many others. You must admit that the names of the brands are impressive, and such companies cannot fall into the dirt with their faces by launching an online store that would not meet all their requirements and customer expectations. And if you look at the statistics of the site alexa.com, then we will see that Magento is the most popular e-commerce platform. Among the million most popular online stores, most are written in Magento. Such a popularity of the platform is explained by its diverse and rather wide opportunities, but let's not forget who the owner is, which gives an additional impetus to the success of Magento.
Fig. Graph of the popularity of e-commerce platforms for April 2014
Magento is an open source platform written in PHP. You can use both the free version of the platform and the paid ones: Enterprise version with enhanced functionality and support for your online store, or Magento Go, which works in the “cloud”. If you are faced with a choice between the Community and Enterprise versions, you first need to determine what goals you set for your online market. If your shop will attract no more than 1000 unique users per month, and the average monthly number of sales will be close to 100, then the Community version should be sufficiently functional. The Enterprise version, in turn, has the following advantages over the Community: the ability to organize gift certificates and cards; the possibility of customer segmentation, as well as the organization of closed sales of goods for certain groups of customers; included functionality for wholesalers and distributors; Magento Enterprise has the opportunity to encourage regular customers by awarding bonus points for purchases at your online store. As you can see, there are enough differences, but whether you need additional paid functionality is up to you.
And so, we turn to the advantages of this platform. One of the main advantages of Magento is its modular architecture. In practice, this means that you have a core of the platform around which, as the functionality needs expanding, modules are attached. You can find these extensions in Magento Connect, where there are both paid and free extensions for the online store. We also note the fact that for the community version the number of quality extensions, even free ones, is off scale in the market. Going to Magento Connect, we see that we have a very large selection of different extensions, for which we can sort them by popularity, platform, Community, Enterprise, Magento Go, which will be used for “extension”, as well as by price: free and paid.
Fig. Magento connect
Also a significant advantage when choosing Magento is a responsive web design supported by the platform, which comes in the boxed edition. That is, the site design on Magento will be conveniently viewed on devices with different resolutions and formats, without requiring the creation of certain types of site for various devices, be it smartphones, tablets or netbooks.
Fig. Mobile and standard version of the site swarovski.com
The next distinctive advantage of the Magento platform is the ability to create and then manage several online stores from a single entry point, which removes the need to work with several admin panels at the same time. Another important advantage of the platform is the ability to assign specific characteristics to a product, which are necessary only for this type of product, work with several currencies and, if necessary, convert them quickly.
Let's now get acquainted together with the appearance of the admin panel on the example of performing some tasks.
Fig. Manage Product List
Fig. Editing categories of groups of products through the admin interface
Fig. Editing statistical pages
Let us turn to the shortcomings of this platform. The first thing that comes to mind is the demands on resources, because for the good work of the production site you need a good server and high-quality hosting. The next disadvantage of developing an online site on this platform is the cost of developer services, if you need to implement custom functionality. Well, open PHP-code carries some problems, because unknowingly you can harm your store, rummaging where it is not necessary.
Well, it's time for conclusions. Magento is a good solution for your online store, which has been proven by many well-known brands. Wide functionality, intuitive interface, the ability to decide for yourself what extensions you need, the ability to integrate with third-party services, and all this is available to you even in the free Community version - these are the reasons to make a choice in favor. Magento. We also note that in Western countries, representatives of small and medium-sized businesses use the Magento platform. In the CIS countries, the situation is fundamentally different, because not every small business representative can afford to maintain an online store on Magento, so in these countries, the platform is mainly used by medium-sized businesses.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/237815/
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