E-commerce has become one of the leading industrial sectors in market and has earned much popularity all over the world. With the elevated use of e-commerce, it has become extremely urgent to deal with the customers from different countries, who speak in different languages and use different currencies for transaction. Magento, the open-source e-commerce web application solution offers a global platform with many unique features to facilitate complete operational efficiency of e-commerce. The useful features of Magento, which helps in growth of e-commerce, are as follows:
Flexible Site Management:
Magento has easy and usable interface that helps in managing online channels and number of stores from a single administration panel. It is also possible to create roles and users’ permission system. Magento provides option for using Google Website Optimiser Integration for multivariate testing. It is possible to design the websites and customising them with different templates provided by Magento. This open source technology can be integrated with any other third party web application via the web service API of Magento.
Marketing Tools and Promotions:
Magento e-commerce provides flexible options for pricing, for which it is able to create wide range of promotions. Different Magento toolshelp in successful e-commerce, such as cross-sells for product pages, up-sells for shopping cart, landing page tools for PPC, Google sitemap tools, search engine friendly URL tools and many more.
Search Engine Optimisation:
Magento offers many useful features for the creation of SEO-friendly websites, like full control on URLs according to SEO requirements, creation of Google site maps etc. Magento also helps in auto-generation of popular searches and customisation of Meta information for different web pages.
Analytics and Reporting:
Magento provides options for various reports to optimise a website, which can run multivariate and A/B testing. Different types of reports used are sales reports, tag reports, tax reports, search term reports, coupon usage reports, RSS feeds for new orders, best viewed product reports and best purchased product reports.
Catalogue and Product Browsing:
Magento aids in efficient browsing of catalogues and products. Catalogue browsing includes variety of features, like up-sells, cross sells, popular search-terms, filtering by product tags, static block tools for creating category landing pages and product comparison facility. On the other hand, product views, product option selection, stock availability, multiple images per product, image zoom-in and multi-tier pricing up-sell are some of the features that help ineffective product browsing.
Mobile Commerce:
With the extensive enhancement of smartphones and mobile-device usage, requirement for mobile commerce has also gone up. Magento offers competent m-commerce service, which enables the viewers to browse through mobile-optimised versions for viewing the full catalogue or the smaller selection of products customised for m-commerce customers.
Checkout, Payment and Shipping:
Magento checkout features provide the option of one-page checkout, acceptance of gift message per order or per item and shipping to multiple addresses from single order. All the orders from account or guest check-out is supported by SSL security. Magento is integrated with various payment gateways and methods for accepting purchase orders, money orders and checks. Magento supports different shipping options, like free shipments, multiple shipping from single order etc. This also provides table rates for number and weight of the products, variable rates according to distance of destination and many more.
Magento web development provides an end-to-end solution for e-commerce, comprising many other features to serve for managing catalogue, products, sites or orders, customer service, customer accounts etc. Magento thus guarantees the flexibility of expanding e-commerce business to any desired level.
Author Bio: Tom Brown is a freelance writer, who writes regularly about latest trends of technology and economics, like e-commerce, Magento web development, PHP technology, SEO etc.