The truth about Magento

The Good about Magento 

Magento Open Source is free. Free. Let me make sure you read that right and say it again. Free. Many eCommerce developers place Magento being free at the very top of the list of pros for the reason to start your eCommerce business through Magneto. 

Another thing that tops the list of reasons why developers love Magento, is the fact that you can host and manage many domains with a central admin. This saves time, money, and effort for those businesses managing many storefronts. Having a central backend allows you to create products, attributes, checkout rules, and many more custom features, then assign them to specific stores while maintaining brand identities. 

Magento is very customizable, although it is mostly customizable through copious coding. This means you can create vibrant and unique content and sales experiences to stand out in the flood of eCommerce sites. There are people here at NuEthic that are ready to help develop your eCommerce site. All you have to do is contact us for your free Magento quote. 

Even more Benefits of Magento

Magento has numerous built-in eCommerce features such as promotional pricing, an expedited and streamlined purchasing process making the Magento Platform strictly focused on eCommerce. Magento Commerce also features analytical tools to help increase your revenue and gain more traffic to your site.  Magento Open Source has the ability to add these extensions as well but is not included right out of the box. There are however numerous integration options with third party services. There are extensions that include integrating your site with Google shopping, Google analytics and even content management services like WordPress. In this customization and peer-reviewed community of Magento open source, there are numerous suggestions out there for must-have extensions. Of course, this varies based on your business wants and needs. However, we think this blog– by Brian Peters from sumo- has a solid list of great extensions to add to your Magento site or talk to the developers about including. 

Magento is scalable. This means you can start small maybe even basic, then upgrade to Commerce or just grow your site through open source. This also makes Magento adaptable in the fact that it can grow and change with your business. This means staying with the same platform for years to come. Even as your business grows and adapts to trends you maintain the continuity your customers will grow to love. 

Magento can be set up to be reliable under the high volume of traffic. You will also be building a secure website that will be PCI compliant by the time you are taking credit card orders. Along with this platform, you can choose a hosting provider that best fits your needs, we suggest using jetrails. Giving you greater choices and flexibility as you build your eCommerce kingdom. 

Does Magento offer Headless Commerce?

Headless commerce is here for the foreseeable future and Magento has had a seamless transition into headless eCommerce. Your frontend (head) design and development can benefit greatly from not being attached to the backend. What this also means for you is that you can have different website functionality under one website. If you are unsure what headless commerce is still or if it is right for your business, we have a very in-depth blog all about headless commerce and the platforms that support it here. 

The Bad about Magento

Magento is very customizable. 

How can that be bad? 

Well, unless you are well versed in the platform and a certified developer this can create a nightmare for opening your shop or switching platforms. The idea of set-it-and-forget-it eCommerce is lost on Magento and if you are running and updating your own Magento site I hope you have a lot of Excedrin! Migrating your Magento takes time from other business efforts being that the updates are very time consuming and Magento keeps rolling them out quarterly as an effort to improve the platform. 

There are underlying ongoing costs that you may not think of as you decide on Magento. Even if the open source is free, there are barrages of updates that will need to be manually installed. If you are well versed in coding or have an on-hand Magento Developer, this is not an issue. Check our blog on the cost of Magento for more.

However, usually, the most cost and time-effective solutions are to hire support to maintain and update your site, such as NuEthic. 

The open-source nature of Magento means you can customize the code in any way you choose to. That may sound amazing but when you start to realize that having a highly customized backend, makes it more difficult when you upgrade or update Magento it sounds less appealing. You may even overdevelop your eCommerce site and break the stability or usability of your site.  

Magento has a long line of open support tickets. That just means that if you do run into issues, you either pay to bypass the official support system or wait until it is your turn. Either way, if your site is down, you are losing money. This represents yet another negative that can be avoided with our support here at NuEthic. 

Who Should Choose Magento

So you’ve read up to this point and you haven’t decided if Magento is right for you? Chances are it can be. Do you have multiple stores under one admin? Then Magento is right for you. Do you want an insanely unique shopping experience? Magento is for you! Do you have the time to build and maintain a site that requires coding expertise? If you said no to that last question, Magento still might be right for you. Even if Magento is not right for you, we have numerous options and expertise to help you along in your eCommerce sales and websites. 

Conclusion

Magento is a great Platform as a Service (PaaS). It is highly customizable but difficult to manage on your own. The open-source if free but you will be paying in your time or in support to update and maintain your sites. Magento is scalable and secure, but not without fault.  Ultimately, Magento may not be for every business but it has some amazing benefits for most. 

Whatever platform or service you decide to utilize it will help to look into those who specialize in the development and maintenance of eCommerce sites. We at NuEthic constantly strive to improve the user experience of your site.