Magento is voted as number 1 e-commerce system by the Internet Retailer B2B 300. Companies like Nike, Samsung, Ford, Omega Watches, Christian Louboutin, Bulgari, and others also use Magento. Do you know Magento e-commerce platform powers 29.89% of all online stores?

So, with the final decision to make your business online, you need to consider a few things. You must know the reasons why people are choosing Magento as their choice of platform.

Magento powers 1% of the internet. It might sound an insignificant number, right? But do you know there are 1.5 billion websites are there in total? Now imagine the number that Magento powers.

11% of the US-based websites use Magento as the preferred platform. However, the popularity of the Magento platform is rising in Western Europe, Russia, and other places also.

But why Magento has gained such huge popularity that most of the e-commerce site wants Magento as their backend platform?

It not only helps the store owner but gives a better user experience which is essential for the success of any e-commerce business.

Here are the top reasons for choosing Magento for your ecommerce website.

Owner’s & Developers Perspective

1. Built specially for Online Retail

One of the specific reasons for using Magento for your web development is that unlike WordPress or other, Magento is built sole by keeping the online e-commerce in mind.

The basic e-commerce needs like Inventory management, supplier management, advanced shipping as well as user dashboard are there in the Magento. Additionally, it allows the product bundling, newsletters, built-in cross-sell along with the CMS option.

Therefore, without a doubt, it can be said that Magento gives better users’ experience.

2. Open Source

Magento is an open source platform which makes it one of the preferred choices of the developers. Therefore, with the knowledge of Magento developing, anyone can use it for website development.

The Magento Community Edition (CE) is completely free. Therefore, you can install and use any of the Magento version.

A Magento expert can easily accelerate the performance of the Magento online store with new features and functionalities by developing or installing the Magento modules.

3. Top-notch features

Magento offers a huge number of features and extensions that developers and store owners can use. Some of the top features of concern are as follows

• It enables innovative filtered search option
• It allows role specific features
• Google website optimizer integration for A/B
• It allows managing multiple stores from one setting
• It allows multiple locations of the stores

Due to such innovative numbers of features, Magento stays ahead of its competitors.

4. Mobile friendly

More than 250,000 merchants worldwide use Magento. It is known to all that a huge number of searches are generated on mobile devices. Therefore, no matter whatever platform you use, it becomes important that your site must remain mobile compatible.

Magento intends to give a full responsive view and functionality that is more than desktop. It supports the HTML5 that surely increase the shopping experience. It automatically adjusts the image size and also allows the video.

With the increasing mobile search, having a platform which particularly intends for mobile use will help definitely in CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).

5. Magento is SEO friendly

It is not about to have an e-commerce website only. To get the optimum result you need to appear on the search results for the relevant keywords. For this, you need a strong and organized SEO strategy.

Magento is an SEO friendly platform. It is developed by keeping advanced SEO in mind. Magento comes with an in-built digital marketing assistant.

Magento 2 has a drag-and-drop visual merchandising. It has features like SEO friendly URL structures, URL rewrite, tag, and description, etc. Magento allows Google and HTML sitemaps those help the bots to crawl the site and to make it appear on the top for the relevant queries.

Users’ Experience Perspective

6. Advanced Search Feature

Do you know that roughly 3.5 billion searches used to happen daily on Google? Imagine the numbers of data is being fetched each day to users. The new Magento 2 with the advanced search option presents the filtered data to the potential customers. No matter, where the store located physically.

7. Personalization

Have you ever noticed that Google used to show the news in the browsers which you have searched earlier or similar to it? Therefore, it helps you to search for something that you are interested in.

Personalization becomes an important feature nowadays which is done with the help of tracking the behavior of potential buyers.

The innovative technologies of Magento 2 allow the users to see that they are interested in. With a better visualization of the products, you can only expect a better user experience of the visitors that will help you in increasing ROI.

Conclusion

Over here, the reasons for integrating Magento for your e-commerce web development has been discussed.

You read the benefits of using Magento as the platform of your e-commerce site and why you must use it for web development. It is expected that worldwide online e-commerce sales on Magento to grow to $224 billion by 2020.

What are your reasons for using Magento in building an e-commerce website? Please feel free to share your thought in the comment section. If you like the post please share it with your friends too.

Are you planning to develop an e-commerce website? Please get in touch with us for a detailed discussion.

Drupal is an emerging web development application and open source CMS (Content Management System) used for the back end system. This highly appreciated content management framework is highly used to build powerful template system, customizing the RSS feeds, maintaining user accounts, handling and creating menus, multi-user or single-user blog, online forum, and so on.

You need to contact a skilled Drupal programmer, who would customize your website in order to make it more attractive. The web developer would deploy the best applications into the web portal making it more interactive. While hiring a web developer, you need to consider certain key factors. While choosing a web development firm for Drupal development, you need to ensure whether it includes the following features:

• Flexible working hours
• Well experienced work force
• Drupal theme customization and modifications
• Transparent working style
• Low development costs
• 24/7 quality customer support
• Portals maintenance work
• Flexible payment plans
• Extensions development
• Custom module development
• Project management system tracking
• Drupal custom theme development service

There are manifold reasons to hire an experienced Drupal programmer to custom develop your multi-user web portal. These skilled professionals come with an extensive knowledge of core Drupal framework and thus they can handle the work with specialized hands. These skilled web developers by means of custom Drupal development would add a high degree of functionality in the web portal, thus, streamlining the whole process of managing the development of the website.

You can take advantage of outsourcing the Drupal development task to a reputed web development company. However, you need to ensure that you have chosen the best in the industry for Drupal integration and customization. The programmer should have relevant experience to develop high quality Drupal development solutions customized to your business needs, within the shortest turnaround time. He should also be able to get you easy-to-customize, well-designed, W3C standards validation, and cross-browser compatible Drupal template/theme.

• A good Drupal development professionals needs to posses the following –
• Proficiency in PHP, HTML, MySQL, JavaScript, XML, CSS, and Ajax/jQuery
• Ability to deliver final project within stipulated time
• An experience of minimum 5 years in website development
• Ability to work efficiently on multiple projects

At the time of hiring, you should check for all these qualifications and choose the best in the industry to build your multi user web portal.

Nowadays, people in more numbers are looking for information on mobile phones and tablets, so, responsive web design has a significant impact on the SEO as well. In order to affect SEO positively, a website needs to have all the required elements of a responsive design.

So, how does responsive web design bring benefits to SEO? Let’s have a look:

• Enhances local SEO ranking: When you are targeting local keywords, the responsive web design would improve the search visibility for your web portal. When more numbers of mobile users are searching for local business directions, then, a responsive web design helps the search engine (Google) to identify that specific website, bringing a good page rank in the local search engine results. If the web pages are not mobile friendly, then there will be huge bounce rates due to poor user experience, which would negatively affect the position of the website in the search engine results.
• Helps to decrease SEO investment: A responsive web design comes with a single URL for both the mobile and desktop users, making it easier for the search engines crawl the content and the URL with ease. All the onsite efforts on the desktop version get converted into the mobile version, which includes SEO friendly content, meta tags, and internal linking structure. In a similar way, link building efforts are also equally maintained for both mobile and desktop versions, with the help of responsive web design.
• Locates and removes duplicate content: The website owners, who usually develop a separate mobile version of their website, have the tendency to replicate the original content from the original website to the mobile version. However, this leads to content duplicity and reduces the credibility of the mobile site in the search engine. With the introduction of responsive web design, now, the mobile site owners can develop the unique content removing all the challenges of duplicate content.
• Improves conversion rate: A non-responsive website is unable to compete with other mobile-friendly responsive websites, thus bringing a negative impact on the business. In order to grow your business, you need to reach out to more number of target customers and stay a step ahead than your competitors. A larger consumer base would automatically increase your chance of conversion.
• Saves money spent on mobile app development: Business owners can save money and time with responsive web design, which otherwise would have to be spent in developing an additional mobile website. With responsive web design, there is no need for separate development, support, and maintenance.

A major percentage of website developers prefer Laravel Framework over other PHP frameworks. Laravel framework comes with a myriad of features that aid in rapid website application development, by providing the programmers with structured, reusable, and clean codes and advanced features.

Some of the features make Laravel the most popular are as follows:

Eloquent ORM: Laravel framework comes with in-built Eloquent ORM. This system enables the user to work with database through proper implementation of Active Record and performs common database operations through various models, without the need of writing complex SQL queries. Simultaneously, you can also take advantage of synchronization of running databases, through Laravel database migration, on various development machines.

Blade template engine: Just like other PHP frameworks, Laravel supports MVC (Model-View-Controller) design rule. It lets you simplify the complex and large web app development by keeping the business logic layers and the UI (user interface) separate. Along with the other features, Laravel comes with blade template engine, which includes the plain PHP code in the view, and then compile the views into PHP codes. Thus, the performance of the website can be enhanced by compiling the views into PHP codes, and then caching the codes until the views get changed. Blade engine can further make the process of data display easier for you, and extend the layout without affecting the speed of the application.

Authentication library: Laravel framework also makes it easier for the developer to build secure website application through implementation of different types of authentication. Apart from implementing various authentication services, one also needs to have control on the behavior of individual authentication services simply by changing the configuration file. It also has an in-built authentication library, which has several security features that include login page creation, data encryption, option to reset passwords, and CSRF (cross site request forgery).

Multiple file systems: Laravel framework is designed with the native support for multiple file system through FlySystem- a third party package. Through this feature PHP web developers are able to simplify configuration by using both cloud-based and local storage options. It also gives the option to customize the various configurations through config.php or filesystems.php. This feature eases the process to keep consistent APIs by choosing various drivers.

Events: These enhance the modularity and performance of Laravel. You can have the option to use events for creating class. This feature helps the developer to listen to all the events in the website and monitor the events that occur in a website, executing specific tasks. The user can further remove or add tasks to be executed based on particular events, by writing customized functions.

Advantages of web application for a commercial organization

• Easily manageable: The web based applications help to main various business related factors and lets you update easily on the system server. You can even monitor client updates and requirements through the server easily and quickly.
• Cross platform compatibility: Most of the web applications are made compatible to run on various platforms. A majority of the web apps run on Linux, Windows or Mac OS. With the help of these applications, you would be able to manage your sales and keep a record of your stocks easily. This also aids in taking important decisions like flow of cash, price of different products, and the required manpower.
• Reduce business costs: Web applications can bring down the production and such other costs related to maintenance and support by a considerable amount. This can lower the needs of recruiting more personnel toward records keeping of attendance and controlling the user system.
• Highly deployable: It lets you do a lot of business performances with a limited bandwidth. It gives you an easy access to reach your end customers. With the help of web application, you can streamline the business processes, widen the access systems, and manage consumer relationship in a much better way.
• Secure live data: It lets you store complex data system. You can even access these data move the same to some other systems. On the basis of this theory, the cloud based data storage system got introduced. With the help of cloud based method, you can create a common data system to store and access your data and software, which are needed for the business operations.

You can get these features by hiring a web application development company. This would help to reduce your expenses, and these highly experienced professionals would provide a strong infrastructure for your business. They would help you to create presentations, projects, or dissertations by unique ideas in the most professional manner. They would be developing these applications using various types of technologies like ASP.NET, Python, Java, or Java Script. They would understand the business needs and help you in selecting the right software for your business. You would be able to extract maximum benefits for your business by taking advantage of their services.

UI (User Interface): This is the most significant and basic part of a mobile application development process. The major part of this is associated with designing, which is quite important and needs a lot of creativity. Designing a mobile app UI is not only about the usage of aesthetic elements, fancy typography, modern themes, and appealing color schemes. It is not only about making everything on the mobile screen look beautiful and nice. User Interface designing foresees how to gel up everything together with each other, in regard to the functioning of the application, and thus increasing user retention, user engagement, and improving the recognition of the product or the brand, ultimately resulting in higher percentage of revenue and success. The objective of User Interface lies in catering to both the needs of basic and advanced end users. Interfaces act like faces – they create identities and trigger emotions. If the UI is good, then the user experience is also fabulous. The website and mobile development company has expert designers who understand the nature of your business and create the UI that communicate with the identity of the business. A good UI reflects the brand value and brand identity.

UX (User Experience): It lets the user feel about the application. After UI has done with the design and navigational flow, the User Experience deals with the user’s interaction aspect with the app. The main objective of an efficient UX is to gain the confidence of the users by developing a usable but simple application, giving complete satisfaction to the users. The UX engineer does an extensive research on the target audience of your business, the user demands, the industry niche, and the existing and future market trends. The final upgraded design in UX focuses more on the interaction and usability.

A flawless mobile application comes with a striking UX and UI. Interfaces are intuitive and delightful to use and a well-executed User Experience helps to diagnose those design challenges and resolves those before launching the application. It provides the user with top notch experience, in terms of the look and feel, and navigation. It helps to establish an exclusive value proposition for the mobile app, and help your business by building brand reputation and generating higher revenues.

You can contact a reputed company that provides UI/UX development services and proceed to create a suitable mobile application for your business that would generate higher returns on the investment.

Magento extensions or modules are basically of three kinds, which are as follows:

Local: This module or extension is developed by a third party to suit your specific needs. These extensions are placed in directory or folder, as [magentodirectory]/app/local/[namespace]/[extensionname].

Community: These are extensions available freely on the Magento website or any other community website. It is placed in directory, as [magentodirectory]/app/community/[namespace]/[extensionname].

Core: It is developed by Magento itself and is available in the default distribution of Magento, as placed in the core directory, like [magentodirectory]/app/code/core/[namespace]/[extensionname].
If these seem a bit Greek to you, then understanding directory and namespace would help to see the things clearly.

Directory: This is the root directory where the folders in Magento are stored.

Namespace: In Magento, this is the directory which you create above the extension. This is actually a category of extension, just like a collection of class in programming. Namespace has a collection of Magento modules or extensions. You need to place the name of your company as namespace. You can create a module in your existing namespace as well, without any restriction.

The complete flow of Magento

Whenever any URL is typed in Magento, it loads the content through an extension or a module. The module gets created in controller’s index action.

Action: In a normal Model View Framework (MVC), the event handled by the controller is known as action. For instance, clicking a button is the action of the controller’s interest calculator. The same principle works for Magento as well. The action of an extension or a module is the public function of the class controller in Magento.

Controller: A controller in the Model View Framework is the class that controls the business presentation and the logic. Controller is actually a class in Magento. It is created as php file in the controller directory of the extension or module. The controller has a basic format name, like IndexController.php. Here, controller is prefix and Index is the name of the controller.

It is important to understand the nitty-gritty of programming language, to build your e-commerce website in Magento. To create hassle-free custom extension for both Magento version 1 and 2, you need to take help of a reputed professional company, which comes with years of experience. Their highly knowledgeable programmers would understand your business needs and proceed to build a custom extension in Magento to give your business a boost.

To-do list before you proceed to migrate to Magento 2

If you are planning to migrate to Magento 2, then here’s a checklist, you need to do:

#1: Take a full backup of your store (Magento 1) that includes all the folders, files, and the database.

#2: Do a complete analysis of your store, keep things only which are necessary and delete the rest.

#3: You need to create a clone for your Magento 1 store, and you are not to use the live store for this migration process. From this cloned database, you would be migrating the data to Magento 2.

#4: You also need to check whether your current themes, custom codes, and extensions are compatible with Magento 2. You also need to remove useless and outdated data from the database, which includes compared products, logs, and currently viewed products.

#5: You need to install a fresh version of Magento 2 on the same hosting server as that of Magento 1, to make the migration procedure hassle free.

Migration procedure from Magento 1 to Magento 2

1. The migration process consists of 4 phases:Theme migration: In order to deliver enhanced shopping and store experience, new technologies and methodologies are introduced in Magento 2. You can create new awesome themes or modify your current theme to make it compatible with the new Magento standards. However, you cannot directly transfer the current theme onto the new one; rather you need to make a new theme and make it responsive for the best user experience.
2. Customization: The custom codes you are using for Magento 1 are compatible with the new version. Magento comes with a code migration toolkit that helps you to integrate the custom codes successfully into the new version.
3. Extension migration: Extensions are very significant components, which provide extended functionalities and new features for your Magento store. You need to install the Magento 2 extensions. As your older extensions will not be compatible with new Magento version, you need to install only the relevant extensions.
4. Data migration: This is the last thing you need to do during the migration process. With the Data Migration Tool, you can successfully migrate the orders, categories, settings, products, and store configurations to the new version.

In order to perform data migration successfully, you need to install Magento 2 data migration tool. You need to find the root directory of your Magento 2 and install the relevant tool for that. After the installation, you need to configure the data migration tool, where the directories will contain the configuration files and the mapping. Then you have to migrate the settings from Magento 1 to Magento 2. After that data will migrate from version 1 to version 2. Once it is completed, you will receive a success message.