Everything About Magento Software E-commerce Software

When it comes to e-commerce software, one might have a difficult choice choosing one for their online shop. However, among the many, some do show more promise. And perhaps the best of these is Magento.

What is Magento?

Magento is a useful open source e-commerce software for online businesses. It is based on PHP, and its Modular Architecture is quite flexible. It provides the users with various control options which help them build a user-friendly as well as a search engine-friendly website. Besides, Magento has fantastic features and offers extraordinary flexibility to the store owners.

It provides the user with top-notch e-commerce solutions along with an exclusive support network. While using Magento, one can quickly update the site or can use the automatic feature to do the same. It’s quick, versatile, and straightforward to use. It is a perfect administrative interface to get robust SEO, inventory management tools, and effective marketing.

Why should you use Magento?

There can be many reasons due to which one can decide to opt for Magento. Some of them are listed below:

• Magento is an open-source e-commerce software,
• It’s scalable and helps small organizations to build their business,
• The platform provides sorting and searching of products in several ways,
• It quickly gets integrated with other 3rd party sites which need to run effective e-commerce sites.

Features of Magento

Its features are comprehensive, and you will easily find all the features you want to build as well as run your online store. Here is a list of some of its cool features.

Catalog Management

Irrespective of your product category, your catalog is the main component to attract viewers. Magento offers ultimate catalog management features, such as:

• Allow downloading of digital products like videos, music, etc;
• It supports virtual products;
• Easy to edit and delete the product reviews;
• Full inventory management;
• Supports import and export products for the batch update, offline;
• Highly customizable and have options, like watermarking and resizing, etc;
• RSS feeds, etc.

Marketing and Advertising Tools

Magento effortlessly handles your online store and also helps you in marketing, promotion, and conversion. It offers various tools to make your advertising easier, such as:

• Cross-selling products;
• Promotional pricing is available for selected products as well as categories;
• One can send coupon codes via emails, newsletter, or even offline;
• Easy to manage coupon usage, polls as well as newsletter;
• Easy to promote new products and free shipping;
• It allows price variation as per the quantity and group;
• It even provides landing page tools for PPC, URL tools, new product promotional tools, and so on.

Fully SEO centric

Magento offers a wide range of options to provide you a smooth SEO for your website.

• Provides Google Sitemaps;
• It automatically separates popular searches as well as modifies them as per the user preference;
• Supports Search engine friendly URLs;
• It’s easier to use meta-tags for the products;
• Faster loading since it uses less .css and .js files.

Mobile-Friendly Commerce

Since most people are using their mobile phones for browsing the internet as well as for shopping. Having a mobile-friendly website is quite a necessity in today’s time. Thus, this is one of the coolest features of Magento where it allows the users to quickly browse the whole site catalog or select or buy the products conveniently. You can optimize the site as per your mobile user’s preference.

• Magento uses mobile HTML5 technology to help you create a mobile-friendly storefront;
• Optimized as per Android, iPhone, and other mobile browsers;
• It produces a clear and user0friendly product display for the users;
• It supports audio as well as video files;
• Easy to zoom, swipe and also support multi-touch;
• Drag, drop, and other options are also available with Magento.

Other features include order management, complete site management, user account, payment, checkout and shipping, tracking, analytics and reporting, customer service, and international support.

What are the advantages of using Magento?

• Magento is an entirely user-friendly e-commerce software;
• Magento is compatible with tablets, mobile devices as well as smartphones;
• Since Magento accepts various payment options, it attracts various visitor since they can easily choose their preferred payment method;
• Magento provides various extensions which are required for the development of an online store.

Are there any disadvantages of using it? Well, everything has its advantages and disadvantages. Magento also has few cons, let’s have a look.

• Magento requires more extensive disk space as well as memory;
• If you are using Magento, you have to invest more time to build a customized website with full functionality;
• Sites built with Magento are a bit slow as compared to other e-commerce sites;
• It requires a proper hosting environment; else the user might face various issues.

Still Have Doubts?

Do you have doubts about why and how Magento is better than other e-commerce platforms? Then keep reading and you will get your answer.

Magento offers its users an ultimate e-commerce solution by providing them an efficient combination of extensive support networks and scalable design. It facilitates quite a high ROI. Its highly dynamic interface is best for selling as well as providing a joyful experience to all the visitors.

Why choose Magento over other e-commerce platforms?

In 2013, Magento was recognized as the most popular e-commerce platform in the world. In 2014, the market share of Magento was among the 30 most popular e-commerce solutions. Due to its popularity and long history, plenty of information is available for the developers as well as users.

There are various things that make Magento better than all other e-commerce platforms.

Here, Let’s have a look:

• Magento has simple as well as easy-to-use features.
• It updates the website automatically. This feature is not available on most of the other e-commerce platforms.
• Its functionality is simple, quick, and versatile. It’s easier for the visitors to browse as well as buy the products comfortably while enjoying the services.
• Magento supports more than one website to promote your products or service across domains.
• One can easily create a scalable website using Magento and can even use it to scaling the existing sites.
• More than 2 lakh online retailers are using Magento for their business as an e-commerce platform.

Now you know what Magento is, what features it offers to you, what are its advantages as well as disadvantages, you might be curious to know how to install it. Here are the steps to download it.

How to download the Magento Software

Follow the simple steps to download the Magento Software:

Part 1: Download

1. Go to www.magentocommerce.com, click on products, then downloads and then on Magento or simply click on https://www.magentocommerce.com/products/downloads/magento/. You will get a screen stating the Magento versions, full release.

2. Click on the drop-down menu where Select the format is written. You will see the files in .zip, .tar.gz and tar.bz2, select the format you want to download, and click on the download button.

3. Once the download is complete, go to the download folder and extract the Magento file and upload the files to your localhost or web server.

Part 2: Technical Configurations

4. Magento requires a MySQL database; you need to create a new, empty database for Magento along with a username & password. You can choose any name or password at your convenience.

5. Now, open the browser and go to your Magento file path, for example, http://localhost/magento, to start the installation process. Once you do that, the Magento installer screen will appear in front of you.

6. Simply click on the continue button to start installing the software. Then another screen will pop up, for the validation for Magento Downloader. You need to enter the details of the database if you want to get the InnoDB support for Magento. If not required, you can simply click on the continue button and proceed to the next step.

Part 3: Content Deployment

7. Next screen will be Magento Connect manager deployment. It will provide protocol names, like FTP or HTTP, stability version beta, stable, alpha as well as deployment type. Choose the appropriate options and then click on the continue button. Your Magento downloading process will start.

8. You will be directed to the Magento installation wizard, where you have to click on the checkbox which says I agree to the above terms and conditions and then click on the continue button.

9. Once you do that, the next screen will be the Localization screen. You can select the locale, currency, and time zone as per your locality or the given dropdown list. Then click on continue to proceed to the next step.

Configuration:

10. Next screen will be the Configuration screen. Here you need to fill in the information of the database, like the Host, Database Name, Database Type, Username, and password. In case you are not willing to validate the base URL, you can click on the checkbox stating Skip Base URL Validation Before the Next Step. Then click on the Continue button.

11. The above step will take some time as Magento will be creating the Database Tables.

Part 4: Creating Users/Admins

12. Next will be the Create Admin Account Screen. Here you have to enter your personal information like your First and Last name, Login information such as username, password, and confirm the password to set the admin account, email. Don’t worry about the encryption key field because Magento will generate the key on the next page. Once you are done filling in the information, click on the Continue button.

13. Here, copy the encryption key, as it will be used to encrypt the passwords, card details, and other confidential information. After that, you can select the Frontend as well as Backend for the new Magento website.

14. Once the installation is complete, click on the Backend button to access the admin panel via your login credentials.

15. Once you log in successfully, the dashboard of the admin panel will appear in front of you.

Now, you are all set to start using your Magento website.

Magento in a nutshell

• Magento enables various payment methods like PayPal, credit cards, money orders, Cheques, etc.
• It has the feature of shipping products of one order to multiple addresses.
• Using the admin panel, one can easily manage the orders
• It provides the status of the order as well as the history of the product. Also, offer RSS feeds and email support.
• Magento supports various tax rates, different currencies, as well as multiple languages.
• It easily filters the products and showcases them in either grid or list format.
• With Magento, it’s easier to browse the products and one can easily zoom-in on the products as well as check the availability of the stock.
• The best feature is it has built-in SEO.

There are full fledge features which one can get in Magento which they won’t get anywhere else. Download the free version of Magento now and start exploring the plethora of features it has to offer you. No doubt you will love it!