How to Leverage the Power of Magento’s Omni Channel Capabilities

The Magento platform is one of the most robust eCommerce platforms in the world because of the ability to extend its core functionality with custom features and third party modules. This allows a business or Magento user to create an omni channel experience by leveraging its ability to take in and push data to other sources.
The main goal of building an omni channel presence as a business is to increase sales and brand awareness. Creating an omni channel experience allows your business to be in the eyes of the consumer as much as possible while simultaneously making it as easy as possible for them to buy from you across these different channels. Magento is a great platform for this because of its massive community and interconnectedness with a multitude of channels.

Ebay

Ebay generates nearly 10 billion dollars a year on its marketplaces. This is a market you cannot afford to miss out on, especially if your competitors are already selling on it.
Ebay owns Magento and with the Magento Enterprise edition you can automatically connect your Magento store to Ebay to publish products programmatically to Ebay. There are plenty of extensions on Magento connect that allow you to publish your Magento products to Ebay if you use the community edition.
*Just remember not every extension on the Magento Connect market place is a simple plug and play feature and can often take hardcore developer hours to get working properly.

Amazon

Amazon product revenue is well passed 60 billion a year and growing. As the largest US online retailer out there, Amazon is the place to be when it comes to publishing your products online.
There are plenty of Magento connect extensions that allow you to publish your products directly from Magento to Amazon. Take the time to evaluate the options, but it is certainly worth investing in a Magento and Amazon connection if you sell your products on both channels.

Walmart

Walmart sales are well above 400 billion a year. Additionally, their online sales are skyrocketing and have now surpassed 10 billion a year. Whether it is getting your products in Walmart stores or on their website, Walmart is not a channel you can afford to miss.
Although there are no extensions (known to me) to publish products from Magento to Walmart.com you can at least export your data into Excel from Magento and start from there. Additionally, you can always build the connection from Magento to Walmart.com yourself.

Target

Target, like Walmart, is one of the largest retailers in the world with large in store and online sales. You can leverage Magento to publish products to Target so that your products are on both the largest US retail companies websites, Target and Walmart.

Mobile

Magento has the highest rate of responsive websites of any eCommerce platform because of its flexible front-end structure. There are a lot of prebuilt responsive themes on Themeforest for Magento and the new default Magento theme is responsive. We built our own fluid responsive theme utilizing the Foundation 5 framework to maximize the responsive capabilities of Magento.
You can also turn Magento into a mobile app with an extension much faster than building one from scratch. Although it may not be the best native mobile app development methodology it is a great way to get something up quickly to see its effectiveness.

In Store

Magento has a lot of great options for shipping due to the amazing community that supports it. Web Shop Apps has built a SaaS platform, ShipperHQ, that can solve complex shipping needs. There are also a bunch of in store pickup extensions on Magento connect. There are many ways to leverage Magento to be an in store tool so that your customers can buy online but go pick up in store. Additionally, a great Magento website should improve in store sales because customers may find your products online but then go to the store to buy.

Social

Magento is one of the best eCommerce platforms for integrating with social media. Social platforms like Add Shoppers, Gigya, Pixlee, Tintup and other social media companies have integrated heavily with Magento.
Having your customers log in with social media can help you better leverage social channels with the Magento platform. Magento has a large collection of third party social media integrations such as log in with Facebook and social feeds like Pixlee that can all help you better leverage social media and Magento. Making sure your products and content is easily shareable is also key to being successful with social media.

Email

Magento has partnered with many of the email marketing platforms and almost all the major email marketing platforms have a strong integration with Magento. Marketing automation platforms like Windsor Circle and Rejoiner can help you take email to the next level on the Magento platform.

Search

Magento is a great platform for SEO. With extensions like the Robogento rich snippets extension, the Creare SEO extension, and the Google shopping feed extension by Rocket Web, there are many great ways to improve your Magento website’s search performance.

Niche

The omni channel experience of your customers is going to depend heavily on your industry and business model. Whether you are B2B or B2C or maybe a combination of both, you need to consider major players in your industry that you want to spread your reach to. Online giants like Staples, Etzy, Toys R Us, Dicks, and Newegg, could be a great place for you to spread your products to. Evaluating your niche and industry would be a great way to roadmap what places you may want to spread your customer experience to, beyond the major players like Amazon and Ebay.

PIM

A product information management software is a great way to leverage the growing omni channel experience customers are looking for. There are many great PIM’s out there like Akeneo and Salsify that can connect to Magento. In fact we just launched Coscokids.com with a connection to Salsify that we built.
If you need to send products to many different places in different data formats, a PIM connected to your magento store might be the direction you need to go in.