We are in the age of Information Technology and e-commerce boom has taken place recently in India. Until the early 2000’s people in India were still buying stuff directly from stores, the primary reason being the unfamiliarity of online sellers. Now, with so many active online sellers in India, people are keen to spend their money into buying from online stores. There is proven transaction security and much ease in the overall process of purchasing. Apart from this, there are many other alluring reasons to shop online like there is wider choice, competitive prices, and delivery at your doorstep.
Most of all, online shopping is the ‘in’ thing these days. It’s considered modern and cool to shop from the convenience of your home.
Magento has played a big role in the e-commerce boom all over the world and India is no exception. Magento is an e-commerce web-application development platform, released in March 2008. Magento community version is free to use and customize. In just a few years, Magento has changed the scene of the e-commerce market very rapidly by bringing other ecommerce-platforms to its feet!
Figure1: Graph plotting Magento’s share in the e-commerce market today. (SOURCE: cometrics.co/statistics/magento-usage/)
Let us look at why Magento has grown so much in the market despite of other big names like OpenCart and osCommerce. We will look at the features Magento provides over other shopping carts and why it is so beneficial to build your e-commerce store with Magento.
Inbuilt Features:
Customizability:
Many a times the above features are unable to cater to the very unique and complex seller needs. That’s where Magento’s custom modules/extensions come into the play. Magento is fully customizable but it is not that easy to customize. It is always better to go to an expert with your customization needs to build a custom and complete e-commerce solution for you.
Community support and features:
As Magento is growing in popularity, the number of people in community is also growing. There are a lot happening simultaneously in the Magento Community online. A lot of questions are being asked in the forums, new features being requested, bugs being reported and fixed and hence new releases of Magento Community are releasing one after another.
It is the truly the era of Magento e-commerce and both an online seller or someone aspiring to become one can take the benefit. Here are some of the businesses who have used and benefited from the Magento Platform:
Figure2: Some businesses who use Magento. (SOURCE: cometrics.co/statistics/magento-usage/)