What are the Main Advantages and Disadvantages of Magento for Online Store?

As a retailer, you cannot complain that today you are short of choices when you face the process of adopting an e-commerce platform to your business’s needs. So, a reasonable question is why you should pick Magento? Why is this CMS highly recommended for any e-commerce shop by all of those who already use it?

Here below, we have compiled a list of advantages and disadvantages of Magento as a CMS in running an ecommerce business. By the end of this article, you will have a clear picture if it is worth giving Magento a try.

Table of contents:

Advantages of Magento
Disadvantages of Magento

Advantages of Magento

Open source with lower costs

Magento is an open source CMS available for any individual. The term ‘open source’ means developers can alter the website functions and features in accordance with what your company actually requires. So, Magento provides a merchant with absolute freedom to improve the site as their business grows.

You probably know that today two main editions are offered by Magento: Community – which is free and suits small and medium-size businesses and Enterprise edition. The latter works well for bigger brands that can invest more than $18.000 per year. The choice depends on the company’s needs and the amount of money the store owner is ready to spend.

Having a smaller business, it is more reasonable to give a try to Community. Being free of charge it does not lack a lot of Enterprise’s features. Go to official Magento site, download Community version and give it a go.

Plenty of built-in functions

In terms of multicurrency, languages, taxes, discounts and coupons, uncountable types of reports, Magento is beyond the competition. It is very comfortable to vary prices whether for a group of products or for a single item in your store.

Magento is really a well-developed platform with the potential to be fine-tuned. Configure orders and invoices, customize shipments and pickups, look through the current orders’ statuses in a single admin panel.

Magento provides an intuitive and easy backend administration and tons of useful features in frontend for the customers to get pleasure from the process of shopping. Admin panel is easy to use and maintain, giving unsurpassed functionality.

Scalability

You can start with a Community but you can move up and, as your business grows, you can give a try to Enterprise version. You are not going to have any problems while products migration or launching a new store. Your Magento can grow together with you.

It does not actually matter how many online stores you are going to have, all your products, your customers’ list and other data you manage can be controlled in one backend office.

In addition, Magento has a lot of Magento partners and supporters updating their bundles of extensions every month. You can be absolutely sure that your Magento will work smooth and accurate no matter how huge your business becomes.

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Popularity tells much

It has been popular since 2008 staying the best e-commerce software solution for internet vendors. Magento is constantly developing and improving. It is continuing to grab the bigger piece of the market. Magento e-solutions are used by more than 250,000 merchants in the world.

Strong global community

When starting a business it is essential to choose the right technology platform that will precisely meet the requirements your company is going to face. And you always want it to already have a lot of active and experienced users. There is always a portion of risk when you deal with a small local web-design company. In these terms, Magento has a good reputation as it is normally advised by most internet merchants.

The big community around Magento has meant that you, as a merchant, can really keep pace with technological changes much faster than if you were developing that functionality all the time on your own.

The community of more than 150,000 developers worldwide ensure you have profound support and assistance.

No matter what size of the company you own as you can never run out of features and numerous plugins Magento’s community supplies. It’s mainly because you always have somebody else doing development work while you can get concentrated on your business.

Disadvantages of Magento

Hosting

Unfortunately, the hosting is not included to the Magento platform, meaning you will have to pay for it separately. At the same time, you can take up this platform peculiarity as a great opportunity to choose the hosting environment yourself and find exactly the one that will suit your needs and specifics the best. There are four basic types of hostings – shared, VPS, dedicated and cloud, and a large choice of hosting solutions out there for every budget and scale.

High Cost of Enterprise Version

Community is free and open-source, which makes it a perfect choice for small businesses. However, medium and large businesses may find the Community version features not enough for their scale; in this case, Magento offers an Enterprise version. It has one large drawback, however – its high price. For smaller and medium-sized businesses, the cost of $18,000 seems to be a bit unaffordable so it is reasonable for this sort of companies to give Community version a go.

Time-consuming and Hard to Customize

The default configuration of Magento online shop is intuitive and easy to grasp even for store admin without the developer’s expertise. When it comes to deep and sophisticated customization an online shop, a user with a poor technical background will undoubtedly have a hard time. However, there are many ways out of this situation, and the lack of technical competence can be leveraged with the ready-made solutions, that can be found in good supply at the Magento marketplace. On the other hand, if you wish that your webstore would be in safe hands, then you can always trust your Magento webstore customization to professional developer.

Conclusion

To summarize what benefits and drawbacks Magento provides let’s point out them again.

It is a fully packed platform for out-of-the-box usage with growing popularity among all sizes of businesses worldwide. Having a strong community of supporters and developers aside a merchant can concentrate on servicing business controlling everything under one roof.