An overwhelming majority of smaller online retailers give relatively little thought to which eCommerce platform they’re using. It’s easy to assume that one shopping cart system is identical to all the others. Considering that most of them provide more or less the same functionality, it makes sense that many people fall into this same trap.
However, Magento offers a number of options that you can’t find with any other platform. Part of this comes from the fact that Magento’s open-source. Developers from all over the world are constantly working on its code to keep it free of bugs. They also come up with new ideas all the time, which keep it relevant while many other platforms remain unchanged for long periods of time.
It’s these features that can really bring something new to your online retail site’s table.
Sophisticated Order Management Features
Magento gives users the freedom to modify an order’s status without canceling it. They’ll be able to edit billing and shipping details whenever they want. Administrators can add in multiple payment and shipping methods, which is something that’s proven to be challenging for most independent online retailers. While large online auction sites have long provided a number of options, most smaller retailers have had to deal with software limitations that prevented them from doing the same.
Advanced Magento order management features also include the ability to send invoices in bulk and customize a store’s backend orders grid. Merchants who’ve been using the same eCommerce platform for years can jump-start their business the moment they switch.
On top of this, the software can watch over more products than you’re ever likely to sell.
Massive Inventory Management
An average business doesn’t need to manage more than a few thousand products, but you never know how fast your own company might grow. Small business owners have to be prepared for the possibility that they could someday be handling a massive inventory. If you do any kind of drop shipping, then you might very well already have a fairly sizeable list of products to contend with.
Magento can handle far more products than nearly any other eCommerce platform that you’re likely to come into contact with. The most basic version, CE 1.9.x, can safely manage upwards of 25,000 items without requiring any additional maintenance. None of the various revisions currently in use impose any notable limitations, which is why some clever store owners have used Magento to manage unbelievably complex retail operations.
If you’ve ever had problems caused by lost SKU numbers, then you won’t have to worry any longer when you migrate to the Magento platform. You also won’t need to concern yourself with lag any longer either.
Why Magento Outperforms the Competition
Out of all the major eCommerce platforms, Magento has the lowest number of HTTP requests and you can set it to make even fewer than the stock configuration does. This, along with the fact that it’s such a lightweight platform, makes it particularly useful for situations where latency is an issue.
Some eCommerce carts are massive and they take a great deal of time for users to load when they want to make a purchase. Frustrating the consumer isn’t a very good way to make a sale. To illustrate just how light Magento is, the full .tar.bz2 package for version 2.3.0 weighs in at less than 99 binary megabytes. Keep in mind that your users will only ever have to download a minuscule fraction of that, so you can be sure that it will outperform almost any other configuration that you can put together.
Best of all, the base package is free.
Magento’s Open-Source Advantage
Since all of Magento’s code is licensed under the OSL, you won’t have to pay anything to download the base package. You’re allowed to make modifications to the code if you’d prefer to make something custom, though most users won’t have to. The biggest advantage is the drastic reduction in cost this represents.
Think about the last time you wondered whether or not you were allowed to copy an eCommerce platform you deployed to another retail site you managed. You may have had to buy a second license just to deploy a second site. By switching to Magento, these kinds of concerns will be a thing of the past.