What is Magento?

If your company sells products or services, how do you make them available for public consumption? If you have a physical store, the answer is pretty obvious. You place products on shelves and post signage for your services. People come in and buy your products.

But what if you don't have a physical store? How do you sell your products then? The most logical and efficient way to sell products without a physical store is through a virtual store, also known as eCommerce.

The ready-made ecommerce solution to take your business to the next level

For those who are behind, ecommerce is another term for selling products online. And there are a multitude of platforms to make this a reality. Even better, most of these platforms can be integrated into the website you already have. These eCommerce solutions allow you to sell products, services, and even physical and digital subscriptions.

For any business trying to expand their offerings, if you haven't already considered an eCommerce solution, now is the perfect time to look for a Magento development company. With more and more people opting to purchase products online, it is a win-win scenario for everyone. That's because the number of online shoppers in 2021 is expected to be a staggering 2.14 billion . And given how the world has changed, we can expect that number to continue to rise dramatically. This is something you cannot ignore.

This means it's time for your business to start selling online.

But how do you achieve this feat? What software can make ecommerce a reality for your business? One of the most used platforms on the planet is the open source Magento .

Magento makes it easy for you to not only sell your products but also:

• Create promotions
• Manage an entire product catalog
• Optimize your online store for search engines (SEO)
• Make it easy for customers to browse and search your products with ease
• Use easy one-page checkouts and shopping carts
• Save user credit card information
• Manage orders
• Offer customer account dashboards
• Offer many customer service options
• Supports mobile HTML5
• Mobile app support for Android and iOS
• Integrate a wide range of checkout features

Magento also includes:

• Targeted promotions
• Rule-based dynamic product relationships
• Persistent purchases
• Automated email marketing reminders
• Private sales
• Gift registries
• Gift options
• Reward Points
• Store credits
• Multiple wish lists
• Add to cart via SKU
• Return Management Authorization (RMA)

For any business concerned about scaling, Magento has you covered. Magento 2.0 can:

• Process a large number of orders per hour
• Handle near-instant server response times for catalog browsing
• Significantly reduce cart and checkout page response times
• Handle order volume spikes, even with very large product catalogs and customer lists
• Have concurrent administrators on the backend

If you're looking for one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms available, Magento is what you need.

Integrating Magento into your website

One thing you should know about Magento is that it includes both the eCommerce platform and a Content Management System (CMS). If you have already built your business website, you may find yourself in a situation where your eCommerce website will dictate the changes needed for your main website.

To solve this problem, Magento is a themed platform, so you can either have your in-house developers create a Magento theme that mimics your main website (so the 2 are indistinguishable) or you can turn to a third party for this task. Either way, it's very possible to make Magento look like your current website.

If you haven't built your website yet, you can get Magento up and running, with a pre-packaged or custom theme, and then build your website around it.

A third option would be to relaunch your website. This option can be very appealing, as it shows that your business is serious about e-commerce and can serve as a kind of grand “reopening” of your online presence.

Of course, you can always go in the opposite direction and build your Magento website first. Once you complete this, you can use the built-in CMS tool or even add a WordPress blog to Magento.

Your best route, however, may be to build Magento and WordPress sites and then integrate them with the Magento 2 WordPress Integration Plugin . This WordPress plugin allows you to combine the powerful eCommerce solution with the CMS/blog features of WordPress. It also provides users with a unified experience that shares session/cart data, navigation menus, headers, footers, products, layout elements, and static blocks through shortcuts or WordPress functions.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that Magento requires PHP7. The latest version depends on PHP 7.3 and will not work on any version older than that. Therefore, when working with developers to build your Magento-based eCommerce website, you should use the latest PHP iteration.

For those who don't have enough experience to combine Magento and WordPress or build a custom website to work with Magento, you can always turn to onshore, nearshore or offshore developers to take care of the development. Since Magento is widely used, most skilled web developers can work with the platform.