E-commerce has in the recent past become a formidable form of trade. According to eMarketer, Business-to-Consumer (B2C) E-commerce is estimated to have reached $1.471 trillion in the year 2014. Sales are expected to rise to $2.356 in 2018. This not only makes E-commerce a force to reckon with, but also a major tool of sale that every ambitious business must embrace. It however presents a lot of challenges making it very important for every business to get it right from the onset. With Magento, you can never go wrong. Magento is a Content Management System specifically tailored for E-commerce websites. Despite being less than a decade old, Magento has become a very trusted platform by most, if not all of world’s leading brands.
Magento is available in two editions, the Enterprise Edition and the Community Edition. They exhibit different features and capabilities to suit different business needs.
Enterprise Edition
Magento Enterprise Edition has been reputed to be a highly performing, tremendously scalable E-commerce platform suitable for both rapidly growing and large business. The latest of this Edition version is Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 . Some of the features that make the Enterprise Edition second to none in the E-commerce industry include;
• Speed and efficiency
Enterprise Edition supports tens of thousands of transactions per hour. Comprehensive tests performed on Enterprise Edition 1.14.1 by Zynovo revealed that the Edition exhibited superior application server response time. It outperformed earlier versions by exhibiting up to 44% faster home page, 48% faster simple product pages and 47% faster check out pages. This edition also exhibited superior CPU utilization. Enterprise Edition 1.14.2 is even faster and comes with new and enhanced features. This ensures that you provide both faster and better experience for all your customers in a bid to drive conversion rates while saving on cost.
• Flexibility
Enterprise Edition offers many features that enable you to tailor the E-commerce platform to best suit your unique business requirements. These features include;
• Google tag manager-This enables merchants to add tracking tags to a Magento site in order to measure, search, personalize and retarget its audience without necessarily modifying This makes marketing campaigns faster and flexible since even the marketing personnel can add tags with very little training from IT specialists. It also offers an accurate form of data collection which is crucial for marketing campaign strategies.
• Visual merchandiser-It enables you to sort you products according to the following categories; newest products, highest margin products, bestsellers and lowest stock. Better still you can be able to sort the products by color making categorization easier and flexible.
• Enhancement E-commerce plugin– This plugin is a product of Google Universal Analytics. It reports on banner view and click data, product sales, product revenue and product positioning performance. It therefore enables you to gain a deep insight into both the shopping and purchasing patterns of all your customers
• Test before launch environment– After developing and customizing your website, Enterprise Edition gives you the chance to test it before you go live. This way you are able to identify changes you may need to make before you launch it.
As a business enterprise you get to choose which of these features you want to assimilate and whether or not you need the plugin. This was you get to tailor you E-commerce platform to dully suit your business needs.
Flexibility does not end with merchandisers. Magento has something for the developers too. Some of the developer solutions include;
• Magento mobile SDK– It enables developers to create full featured Magento apps more easily. It offers all the crucial E-commerce features including customer accounts, promotions, store credits and checkout process. More importantly, it provides access to a complete library of resources which aids in reducing effort and time when creating a custom iOS Magento application. It also provides a sample app to help developers learn and they could even choose to customize it and in the process develop their own apps.
• Automated functional testing framework– Magento provides access to close to 170 automated tests to help improve quality of implementation and marketing time. This is made possible through making it easier to perform acceptance testing when customizing, upgrading or adding extensions.
Whether you are a business or you are a developer, you can always flexibly maneuver your way with Enterprise Edition.
• Mobile App– Statistics show that more people access internet from mobile devices than from desktops and laptops. Kissmetrics also found out that 78% if mobile searches results into a purchase. For this reason, Magento optimizes your store for viewing on mobile devices hence improving the chances of converting searches to sales.
• Security- It is PA-DSS compliant software. It supports strong encryption of data for the security of transactions. This not only secures your business but also boosts you customers’ confidence in transacting with you.
• Scalability- It accommodates large product catalogs, big visitor counts and large transaction volumes with unmatched ease. This means that even as you business grows you can be confident that Magento Enterprise Edition will able to handle you growth. Merchants could also use cloud hosting to power their platforms opening them up the advantages and flexibility of cloud hosting
• Internet Traffic-Magento is SEO friendly making it easy for potential customers to search your business. It offers you as a merchandiser options like coupons, offers and promotions that you can use to convert these visitors to customers. It offers you the possibility of integrating with social media like twitter where you can post you product reviews and hence attract traffic to your website.
Community Edition
Community Edition is free to download. It’s flexible since can be modified by adding features and functionalities through installing extensions obtained from Magento Connect.
Magento doesn’t provide technical support for this Edition warranting the need for the user to enlist the Services of an IT specialist or seek for answers to any questions they might have through the Edition’s User Forum. The User Forum has very many participants most of them exhibit advanced knowledge of Magento hence offering very helpful solutions to questions posed by users.
Developers of Community Edition also have access to automated tests to help improve quality of implementation and marketing time. This is made possible though making it easier to perform acceptance testing when customizing, upgrading or adding extensions just like in Enterprise Edition.
The beauty of it all is that our services are very affordable. Call today at 1-877-65-GOWEB or at www.creatingdigital.com/talk-to-us/contact-us/ and let us help you today!
