What makes Magento Open Source the best platform for an Online ECommerce store?

Magento is one of THE most preferred and popular choices for most online ECommerce stores, and not without good reason! Over a quarter of all the e-commerce websites in the world, including some of the biggest ones, like Harvey Nichols, Warby Parker, Samsung, and Nike all run on Magento.

Apart from being an Open Source platform, Magento is highly flexible, has a flawless administrative interface, and offers a plethora of robust features like search engine optimization and file management tools that help sellers create and run sites matching their particular business requirements.

So what are the points which make Magento the best Open Source platform for an online ECommerce site?

1. Magento Open Source is almost completely free

To state the obvious, being Open Source, Magento Community Edition, the most popular among its 3 versions, is completely free to use, modify, and customize for your needs.

While it does charge for any support you need, you would never even need to go that far, as Magento has probably the largest and most active developer community among all ECommerce platforms on the internet, which provides constant support through its forums.

As such, it also gets regular updates from the developer community working on it, with any security flaws being spotted and fixed immediately. This is what makes Magento the best Open Source platform, one of the safest and most inexpensive ECommerce platforms that you could use for your site.

2. It is designed solely and specifically for E-Commerce

Unlike most of its competitors, from the very get-go, Magento Open Source was designed as a tailor-made platform for e-commerce. Sites like WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla are mainly content management platforms first, with added options of e-commerce plugins.

This is why installing and building an ECommerce site on a Magento Open Source platform is easier than others. Key features offered by Magento which make it the preferred choice:

• User Dashboards
• Client Compartmentalization
• File Management
• Superior shipping and supplier management
• Has a Content Management System
• Newsletters

3. It is highly customizable and flexible

Being an open-source platform, Magento Open Source platform is already highly customizable. On top of that, with a little coding knowledge, Magento can be completely personalized to suit your needs.

Its “What you see is what you get” content management interface and user-friendly page editor lets people with little to no knowledge of coding easily customize detailed pages!

4. It is extremely well optimized for the web

In this fast-paced age, most users expect a website to finish loading within just 2 seconds. Any delay beyond that directly increases the risk of them just giving up and moving on to something else, further lowering your overall conversion rate.

Keeping this in mind, you would obviously want a platform that loads fast enough, allows pages to be cached easily, and also lets you have the features and options which you need on your e-commerce site without it lagging.

Magento Open Source platform is quite well optimized for the web, allowing you to cache your pages quickly, recover data from massive databases in a matter of milliseconds, process queries in no time as well as load pages fast enough to satisfy your impatient customers.

5. It has built-in Search Engine Optimization features

For an online ECommerce site, web traffic through search engines is what determines how much of a return you would get on your investments. Magento Open Source platform is once again, one of the best in this criterion, as it completely takes away the hassle of creating clean SEO optimized URLs, meta tags, and meta descriptions with keywords, category structures, and a lot more. All of these features are already built into its source code, it ensures that your site is search friendly, while saving you an incredible amount of trouble and time.

6. It supports Mobile ECommerce

Nowadays people use the internet from their smartphones and tablets a lot more than from a computer, because they are constantly on the move, and prefer the compact and mobile alternative than these offers. So, for any online ECommerce store, having a mobile-optimized website is a must, and Magento has got you covered! The HTML5 capabilities of Magento Open Source platform, along with its audiovisual and drag and drop capabilities, gesture-based controls, and image scaling for varying screen sizes make it extremely easy to develop a mobile-friendly website.

7. It does not incur extra charges when your site grows

As your site grows in size and scale, you keep needing to add more and more latest features to stay ahead in the competition. This is where most other ECommerce platforms charge exorbitant rates for each new feature that you add, racking up expenses. Magento Open Source platform, on the other hand, being open-source, does not need you to make any additional expenses, however much your site grows. There are no limits on the number of SKUs, products, and product lines that can be uploaded and displayed on the platform.

8. It offers incredible Multi-site functionality

Most websites let you run only one store on one system. Magento Open Source platform, however, can run multiple stores on the single common backend system. Each of your websites can have completely different layouts and designs corresponding to their own stores, even with different, unique domains for each site. You can manage all of them simultaneously through a single admin panel while managing sales and customers from a single database as well.

9. Versatile content management facility

Magento open source platform is intuitive as well as a visual-based page editor. And that’s why store owners are able to create and develop their offerings whenever they need on the fly. It has been noticed that a lot of eCommerce owners face problems due to the lack of these facilities. A versatile content management facility helps to a great extent to tempt more and more users and increase sales at the same time.

10. Easy and secure third-party integration

With help of Magento, the best eCommerce platform, you can easily do third-party integration. You can easily connect the eCommerce experience with Paypal, eBay, Google Shopping, QuickBooks, Mail Chimp, and so on. Apart from this, if the online store owners prefer to use third-party data analytics, they can easily use that with full-on security. 

11. Easy customization of security options

You can perfectly personalize a lot of levels of security permissions. It will help you to keep your eCommerce website safe and easily manage all the internal security issues. You know that PCI Data Security is a standard option. The login screen comes with Captcha and there is a second password setting to prevent any kind of breaches.

 12. Saves a lot of time and money

It is an open-source platform and comes with a large library of custom extensions. You can easily use as well as share tools with other Magento users. It will also help you to save time as you do not need to go to the extreme ground level. Just by using one instance of Magento, a user can create as well as manage multiple eCommerce stores.