If You Are Serious About eCommerce Use Magento

Isaiah Bollinger

Isaiah Bollinger

The eCommerce industry has had amazing growth over the past decade and is continuing to be one of the best industries to be in as a company.  However, as a small or medium size business, transitioning to eCommerce can seem like a daunting task, especially with so much competition already out there.
With that being said, I highly suggest finding a way to build an online platform for your customers to purchase your goods or services, whether that be having your customers pay their bills online or simply buying your physical products. This will make it easier for your customers to buy from you because of the ability to pay for your goods and services without having to spend time traveling or on the phone. Additionally, an eCommerce store is open 24/7 something most businesses do not have the man power to do.
At the end of the day, if you can make it as easy as possible for your customers to pay for something, this will put you in the right position to hold on to loyal customers as well as expand your customer base.
Magento Infographic
There are restaurants that I would have ordered from if they had their own online check out system on their website.  Simply taking me off their site to one of those food-ordering systems that is not part of their website and business is often enough for me to look elsewhere for food. It really has to be incredibly simple for your customers to make a purchase or they will not come back to you because there is likely a competitor that has a better system for making it as easy as possible for customers to get the same goods and services you offer.
If making a purchase has to be as simple as possible for your customers, then building an eCommerce site that is user friendly and specifically tailored to your business is often times what will solve this problem.  This is why we at Trellis find that Magento eCommerce is the only platform available that can provide this level of customizability, aside from building a custom platform from the ground up, which is far too expensive to the average business.
If you look online you will see people knock Magento because it has a larger learning curve than some simpler eCommerce platforms. Yes this may be true and if you are new to eCommerce than Magento may be more difficult than say Opencart, but this is absolutely not a reason, as a business owner, that you should be afraid to have a Magento eCommerce website.  In fact, Magento has a larger learning curve because it has far more functionality and customization capabilities than simpler platforms.

Why Magento?

Magento offers the most scalability and customization of any open source platform, and if you want to grow your business this is the only solution that will allow you to do that without paying the insanely high prices of say an Oracle or IBM eCommerce solution.  Going with a simpler eCommerce solution like Volusion, WooCommerce (WordPress), Opencart, Prestashop, or Ubercart may save you some time and money upfront but will wind up costing you much more in the lack of ability to customize your shopping cart down the road. If you want to go the route of improving your eCommerce stores functionality and design, you may have to rebuild on a more robust platform or invest a lot of money into custom features on an eCommerce platform that is not built for that level of customization.
Magento can support multiple shops within the same backend, custom attributes and attribute sets, wholesale pricing levels, complete UI/UX customization and has great security compared to other open source eCommerce platforms.  The other amazing thing about Magento is its massive community.  This means there is practically an extension for anything you may need to add to your store such as a rewards points system.  You can use Magento to connect to an ERP, CRM, or email marketing platform with their extensions as well as add many other awesome new features found within their extension marketplace, Magento Connect.
There is a reason Magento is the number one eCommerce platform available powering over 200,000 online stores.  It is simply the best and most feature rich capable platform available.  If you think saving several thousand dollars to build a simpler Woocommerce or Opencart site is going to save you money then think again.  There is almost certainly a competitor selling your products and services online with a more advanced platform like Magento, and trying to compete with them without the same eCommerce firepower is going to be a losing battle.
Magento Powers Nike, Vizio, Rosseta Stone and many other enterprise companies. It is the only eCommerce platform that is powering a significant amount of eCommerce websites in the top 10,000, 100k, and 1 million.  The only other platforms powering a large amount in the top 10k are by IBM, Oracle, and Demandware. Those three solutions are going to be way too expensive for the average small to medium size company. Therefore, Magento is the only solution available that is going to provide the scalability and flexibility to compete online with larger companies but still remain affordable to develop in as a smaller company. Just look at this graph of ecommerce search volume by platform by Ahead Works, if that doesnt convince you about Magento than I do not know what will.
Magento Search Traffic Volume

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