Do you own an eCommerce website? Well, then, you must be familiar with Magento. Gartner recognizes it as a market leader in its 2022 magic quadrant for digital commerce report for flexibility, scalability, and robustness.
While this might have given you enough motivation to consider Magento for your eCommerce business, you would certainly not want to settle down based on this data. Instead, consider the pros and cons of Magento before deciding whether to choose it to run your eCommerce website or not.
So, here we are with this blog listing down the pros and cons of the Magento eCommerce platform so that you can make the right decision.
Pros of Magento
1. Flexibility
Being an open-source platform, Magento is flexible. You can easily modify the source code to meet your business requirements. You can even customize templates to achieve desired functionality from your website.
Third-party integrations are another thing that stands out about Magento. They allow you to expand your eCommerce website’s functionality by letting you import products, analyze their performance, or help you plan your future course of action through actionable insights.
2. Rich feature collection
Magento stands out among other eCommerce platforms because of features like multi-lingual support, multiple pricing, and support for multiple locations and stores. For example, you can vary your price depending on the group of customers in Magento, i.e., you can show a different price for the same product to a normal and a premium customer. It allows you to sell your products more efficiently to other customers.
The community version of Magento allows you even more features. You would rarely get these benefits with other eCommerce platforms.
3. A rich community
The Magento eCommerce platform has a large community of 8,000 certified developers, 360,000 forum members, 5,900 contributors, and 1,150 partners to help you in need. Not only do they ensure quick support, but they also help you with countless new ways to solve problems. Various Magento developers have even developed extensions and plugins to make eCommerce websites more efficient.
4. Magento is mobile friendly
Most users use mobile devices for online shopping and expect a website to run and appear smoothly on mobile devices. Therefore, you can’t overlook the need for a mobile-friendly eCommerce platform.
You can easily create mobile-friendly eCommerce websites in Magento that offer users the best mobile viewing experience. You can even create fast, engaging, and reliable mobile apps in Magento PWA studio. As a result, only a few people jump off your eCommerce website, and your sales significantly increase.
5. Scalability
Every store, online or offline, wants to expand in the future. But if your eCommerce platform cannot handle the increased amount of products or the rise in traffic, things can quickly go down the hill. Hence, you must look for an eCommerce platform that can easily handle the traffic spike and aid in your business’s growth.
Magento can easily handle up to five hundred thousand products and thousands of transactions in an hour with ease. You can even customize Magento based on your evolving business needs.
6. SEO capabilities
You may have a unique eCommerce website. But if its SEO is not done right, customers may not find it and not buy your products. Hence, you must opt for an eCommerce platform that offers native SEO capabilities to help you rank higher on Google, Bing, or other search rankings.
Here are a few SEO features Magento offers:
- Rich snippets, prefixes, and suffixes for title tags and metadata for home and product/category pages.
- Canonical tags to prevent search engines from crawling duplicate content.
- XML sitemaps and Robots.txt file.
- Redirects and SEO-friendly URLs.
You can rank higher in search ranking from the day you launch your eCommerce store by combining these SEO features with SEO practices. You don’t need to integrate extensions or modules, as Magento can care for everything.
Cons of Magento
1. Not everyone can afford Magento
Magento is a great eCommerce platform. It’s not for every business. While the community version is free, the enterprise version will cost around $15,000. On the other hand, the premium enterprise version, primarily targeted at enterprises, will cost more than $50,000. Then there are fees for third-party extensions. All these charges can cost you a fortune. Hence, businesses may need to think twice before opting for it.
2. There are only a few authentic Magento developers
Magento has a large community. Yet finding genuine Magento developers is like finding a needle in a haystack. Magento has a vast system comprising twenty thousand files and two hundred data tables. One needs to spend a lot of time mastering it. However, many Magento developers out there only have a surface-level understanding of the eCommerce platform.
The pricing will be high even if you find a reliable Magento developer.
3. Time-Consuming Projects
Magento is a layered eCommerce platform. You can integrate third-party software to customize your eCommerce store to meet your business needs. However, the customization process takes time.
However, not all Magento versions are slow. Enterprise and premium enterprise versions are fast. However, upgrading to them means sparing a fair amount of money which only some are comfortable with.
4. Need for a powerful hosting
There’s a limitation to hosting Magento. You only need to use a dedicated server to host it. Also, you must ensure that your team has proficiency in the server you’re hosting your website on.
Also, you need to have high-level strategic skills to optimize your eCommerce website. Otherwise, it may crash abruptly.
5. A steep learning curve
Even the most skilled eCommerce business owners may hit a wall while getting the hang of Magento. The eCommerce platform can confuse even the most experienced developers. For beginner retailers, it is nothing less than a nightmare.
In short, Magento is not for beginner eCommerce retailers looking to build an eCommerce website using drag-and-drop eCommerce websites. To use it efficiently, you must have some sort of technical understanding. Otherwise, you may find it challenging.
6. You may get duped in the name of product support
Since Magento developers are rare and difficult to master, Magento consultants and developers charge handsomely for Magento support. However, the support sometimes turns out to be different than expected. What you might discover are spammy queries that don’t solve your purpose.
Imagine you spare your hard-earned money for support only to realize the answers are not helpful or you’ve fallen prey to scams. It would be devastating, wouldn’t it?
Conclusion
As you can see from the pros and cons mentioned above, Magento is a brilliant eCommerce platform with everything you need to set up, run, and scale your eCommerce business. However, it also has a lot of intricacies that may make things difficult for you if you need more technical skills.
To master Magento, you must have enough experience and technical knowledge of Magento. Otherwise, you may experience cost overheads, lengthy project timelines, and a steep learning curve. Hiring a Magento development company is also wiser as they know how to navigate through various challenges and help you successfully set up your eCommerce store.
Please share in the comments if you are looking for a reliable Magento development partner. I can help you.
