When starting a webshop, choosing the right e-commerce platform for most people is the same as playing golf on a pitch dark night – they keep on swinging and missing. It’s probably one of the biggest problems most young entrepreneurs face in the early phases of successfully adapting their businesses for the Web.
Why? – Well, because there’s just too many options out there for them to choose from. You cannot just walk into an e-commerce CMS shop (don’t Google it. It doesn’t exist) and ask the guy to give you the ultimate best one for free, of course.
No. Apart from that, as I already wrote in one of the previous posts on this blog, people buy brands, not products. It’s a well-known fact that has been proven over and over again. Instead of focusing on the specifics, most young online businessmen get hooked on some brand’s story and, without even exploring all the options at hand, they buy the software that ends up being all wrong for them.
There are tons of solid and well-respected e-commerce platforms that provide ready-made solutions for your website, like WooCommerce, Shopify, Zen Cart, and of course, the two giants, Magento and Opencart. Although every single one of these listed names is great and similar from most angles, there are still things about them that make them quite different from each other.
In this e-commerce CMS game, there is obviously no one-size-fits-all solution. No, in order to make a smart choice here, you really need to dig deep and seriously get to know all your options.
Figuring out what platform will suit you best comes down to a few basic decisions that need to be made beforehand, such as the size of your online store, your design preferences, SEO and visibility, and of course, your budget.
Seeing how Magento has proven itself to be the most efficient open source in meeting the expectation of both entities (customer and store owners), I have decided (like many of our clients) to give this brand name an unfair advantage over all the other e-commerce platforms and write a stand-alone blog post about why, in most cases, we recommend this solution to all our clients who own webshops:
All Hail The Mighty Magento
For those who don’t know, Magento is an open source platform designed to meet each merchant’s needs and requirements. It can be reconfigured, extended and customized to ridiculous extent.
This platform has become insanely popular these last couple of years. It’s certainly one of the most well-developed platforms for running an online shopping cart.
The script is a first choice for those who want to create a large e-store with many functionalities, being able to manage a large number of products at the same time.
But, before you get all super excited and crazy, you must know that Magento demands a pretty powerful machine to back it up. It’s well known that this platform puts high pressure on user servers.
Why? – Well, because it’s huge system with lots of menus and settings. Magento offers a variety of options that allow almost infinite customization of your site. It has an infinite number of marketing and personalization tools that are specifically designed to help you conquer the market as fast as possible.
To put in layman’s terms, Magento is basically a piece of software that helps you stay ahead of your competition.
Installing Magento
To most users who have “some” or none so ever development experience, installing Magento can become a bit of challenge. Knowing this, we have decided to create a step-by-step “How to download and install Magento Commerce” video and upload it to our YouTube channel, so you can rewatched time after time, after time for free:
With Magento, installation depends on whether you are using the hosted version of the product or whether you are installing the stand-alone version. The complexity of the installation process itself mostly depends on your hosting provider. Some web hosts allow one-click installation, while others suggest that you pass on the whole idea of adding Magento to your site.
We at AltusHost are the former. With just one click, you can have your Magento up and running with us.
So, What Makes Magento Standout? What are Its Key Advantages?
*Multi-store operation from single admin panel: Magento makes it possible for its users to run several stores at one time from one administration station.
*Flexible catalog controls: You can set a template for a given product that will make this product present to a client differently than other products at the same time period.
*Customize, customize, customize: Magento offers a variety of options that allow almost infinite customization of your shopping cart.
*SEO friendly structures: Optimizing Magento for Search is a pretty easy and straightforward task, if you know how to. Luckily for you, Lewis Seller wrote a great blog post on MOZ that guides you every step of the way.
*A great deal of different and highly useful extensions: Magento Connect lists more than 4000 extensions. Most industry experts believe that Magento is the world’s fastest growing e-commerce platform.
*Good support: Magento has a huge and ever-growing community of users who selflessly contribute to discussion boards. This kind of user culture is definitely a plus for all those who are just starting with e-commerce.
*Trust: More than 240.000 online businesses use Magento. The credibility of this platform is unquestionable.
As you can probably see from everything listed above, Magento is a complex piece of software that requires a bit of knowledge from its users in order to fully understand its power and everything that it has to offer.
We at AltusHost care about our active and potential customers. Apart from providing great web hosting services, we are interested in helping our partners grow on their professional journeys as well. Their success is our success.
As a provider that primarily hosts medium to small sized business, we at AltusHost have made it our prime objective to feed our customer with information that will help them better optimize their business for the Web. That is why we have created this Magento Commerce video guide to help anyone interested in adding this system to their webshop master all its options in no time.
Be sure to watch all our videos. I promise you, you’ll acquire some terrific knowledge in no time.
That’s it for now,
Thank you so much for reading our content.
See you soon again,
Goran @ AltusHost B.V.
The author is highly qualified and writes blog posts weekly.
