5 Reasons to use Magento
Magento is an open source ecommerce platform that has helped revolutionise online shopping. We recommend Magento to each of ecommerce clients and it has been highly praised for different reasons. In this short blog post we will aim to list 5 of the most impressive features we have found laying around in Magento.
Multi-Site Functionality
If you have, or think that maybe one day you will have more than one online shop, Magento is for you. This powerful feature means that you can have 2, 5 or even 20 stores running from the same admin panel. This allows you to manage orders and customers from one place instead of having to switch between different websites, this makes life a lot easier and is a great reason to use Magento.
Guest Checkout Option
A small addition that helps separate Magento from the crowd. Many online shops require that your customers have register before making a purchase, this can put them off and potentially lose you the conversion at the very last hurdle. Magento however, offers an alternative, you can adminster whether users have to register or can optionally checkout as a guest to help save them time. This little feature may help boast your conversion rate and has been a hit with our clients.
Search Engine Friendlyness
It’s easier to build a strong customer base if your customers can find you! Magento’s search engine friendly structure and built in tools ensures that your website will be one step ahead of your competition.
Some of the SEO friendly features that are built in to Magento include:
- Search Engine Friendly Rewrites
- Control over Meta Tags for each Page, Product and Category
- Auto-generated Sitemaps
These features can drastically help improve your websites viability online and is a great reason to chose Magento.
Huge Collection of Extensions
Magento is 100% customisable, there’s a huge community behind Magento that helps ensure it’s continual growth. Whether you are looking to alter the way products are displayed or trying to improve the loading time of your website, there are thousands of extension awaiting you in the Magento Connect store.
Here is a quick list of our top 3 Magento extensions:
Social shopping
Ecommerce is going social and Magento is certainly keeping up with this trend. Here are 3 built-in Magento features that help make your customers shopping experience a more social one.
- Customer Reviews
- ‘Send to a Friend’ option
- Add to Wishlist functionality
More on Magento
If you would like to know more about the Magento Ecommerce Platform you can visit their website here - http://www.magentocommerce.com/
Alternatively if you like to know about our Magento pricing you can either call us on 01858 463 750 or drop us an email at info@sjlwebdesign.co.uk
August 16th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
Magento is definitely a great piece of kit, but for first time users it’s worth bearing in mind that a lot of work has to be put in in order to fully customize it to your needs. We have just finished building our store and it has been a steep learning curve – although there is more and more information available on blogs such as this, which will be incredibly useful to people setting it up for the first time.
My biggest tip to first time users is to sort out the canonical url rewrites before letting google anywhere near the site. We made the mistake of rewriting late on, leaving us with 400 indexed pages on google all of which lead to a 404 error. It has been a real drag on the search engine traffic.
Anyway, keep up the good work!