e-Commerce has become the ‘Way of life’ in the last years. There are no products that can’t be brought, sold or evaluated online. The primary reason for the proliferation of online stores is the evolution of e-commerce platforms which have come as a huge sigh of relief for developers. Amongst all, Magento has been the fastest growing e-Commerce platform for the enterprise and is now officially the most searched e-commerce solution. In this post I elaborate on the growth of this merchant platform as “the ultimate e-commerce solution”- Magento.

Growth of e-Commerce

The e-commerce space is maturing. Merchants are more aware of the need and urgency to break into this sector. The act of buying or selling over the networks allows for secure paperless transactions to happen electronically.This has given many businesses the ability to expand from local and regional markets to national and global markets.

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With the rise in technology, the curiosity and needs of customers have increased and thus we can notice more focus towards mobile shopping through smartphone or a tablet. This inturn increases the accessibility, international reach and around-the-clock availability (unlike in shopping malls), fueling to its growth.

Why Magento – Worth and Value

In today’s competitive market, Magento has carved out the niche by providing an unparalleled flexibility to manage content, user experience and functionality of e-commerce store. Based upon my experience of developing Magento connectors, here are a few benefits I have identified.

• Magento with its vast features can build highly scalable multistore, multi-currency, multilingual and mobile online retail commerce infrastructure
• As a developer, providing high functionalities along with an intuitive design has always been a hurdle. This can be easily achieved through Magento Themes, so it becomes easy for you to focus more on the functionalities rather than be concerned with the GUI. If you need to create a unique template for your store based on a predesigned PSD file, you can also customize it according to your requirements
• Where majority of online eCommerce platforms only allow a site to have a single online store, Magento allows a firm to run multiple stores from the same backend interface
• Raising the bar, Magento unlike others, provide ‘Private Sales’ to customers so that unless you login, the store products wouldn’t be shown
• It also allows all of these stores to be managed on the same admin panel, therefore, making the eCommerce platform user friendly
• Magento has a well-organized back-end providing order management, calatog management, site management, analytics and reporting, marketing promotion tools(like coupons) and many more constructive features
• Being an Open-source platform and framework, the can offer diverse extensions offering cost effective solutions.

Magento has been referred to as the Community of Developers.
Innovation is driven by the community and this eventually result into out-of-the-box features. The developers in the Magento Community constantly work on improving and growing with features having the best and cost effective solutions. With their efforts and talent, Magento gained a lot of momentum by providing regular updates on every issue and change.

Considering the benefits of Magento form the Web point of view, it has its own Model-View-Controller (MVC) model. This type of model has a reference back to the view. So when data is updated, it is pushed back to multiple views, hence multiple user interface can be developed easily.The separation of the three components allows the business logic developers to build the classes, while the UI developers can design the interface.

Magento makes use of the following three as the MVC model:

• Layout File(to control what is displayed on each view)
• Blocks(can be easily inserted into any view)
• Model Re-write System

As an eCommerce Platform

Now focusing on Magento from the eCommerce point of view, these are a few features which are essential and observed in the Magento framework.

• Product Display Options
• Analytics and Reporting
• Mobile Templates
• Transaction Options
• Multi-store and Multi-site Functionality
• User Accounts
• Catalog Management and Catalog Browsing
• Search Engine Optimization
• Loyalty Programs
• Product Categorization
• Shopper Filtering
• Discount and Promotion Rules

Magento Usability

Magento has a very user-friendly admin panel. It provides a simple flow so a user can easily handle basic operations without having to read the user manual. Magento allows to manage stores with different domain names with a single common backend in such a way that you may not even know that these stores are connected. Not being an experienced store manager but a developer, we need to think from the other end as to how much usability of our store can be increased. The Magento open-source provides the basic features to guide a developer with the essentials so that it reduces the burden of starting from scratch. Just a few extensions and you are ready with your fully developed and useful eCommerce Store.

The Future of Magento Ecosystem

The Magento community is thriving and wants to push forward fast. It has gained a significant piece of the market share in a short space of time, which they could achieve by providing a feature rich, easy to deliver and cost effective deployment. Magento’s premier eCommerce event, Imagine brings together merchants, partners, developers and open source enthusiasts to share their imaginations. The theme for 2014 Conference was “Transform”.
CHANGE IS GOOD, BECAUSE WHILST THERE IS CHANGE THERE IS INNOVATION.
Reinventing the Wheel, there is hype surrounding the launch of Magento 2.0. Its development has begun with improvement on speed and modularity. The key focus is on remaining a lightweight commerce platform.
It’s an exciting time to be a part of the Magento ecosystem, where Magento joining eBay and Magento version 2.0 are likely to generate even more interest. Thus retailers will witness an unmatched portfolio of offerings that would provide a flexible platform to drive their revenue and growth.

Reference:

>http://www.summit.co.uk/blog/magento-2-what-the-future-may-bring
https://www.magentocommerce.com