Is Magento Still the Best eCommerce Platform Available?

In truth, the opportunities we have for building a whole Magento eCommerce website or any other type from scratch are increasingly rare, most of the time businesses and retailers have a website and are looking for improvements, upgrades and additional functionality.

However, on the occasions we do start from scratch we have a basic number of options available to us:

An HTML option – where we build everything

Increasing this is nigh on impossible, with shipping, payment requirements, complicated product structures, it is a dream to think we can out-build a pre-made solution, much as we would love to.

This puts clients in a real quandary however, it essentially removes the cheapest option from their choices.  eCommerce website has become far more standard and so have their prices.

A Subscription option – where you pay monthly

This is the Shopify, Wix and Squarespace option, these guys are actually doing a very good job for SMALL businesses… from as little as £20 a month, you can pick a design, fill in the blanks, add some products and the money can start to roll in.  I rather wish this were true.

The trouble with this option is that the Clients approach is far to often, make big effort and forget about it.  Because their website does not produce large revenues or is not an integral part of the business, it’s left on the sidelines, £20 a month and not much more.

To back this up, I’d look at Shopify’s announcement last Black Friday where they claimed Shopify Websites took in $1.5billion in revenues… it sounds like a lot, until you factor in that there are 600,000 Shopify websites, the simple maths that the average website took just $2500 over the four day weekend.

It’s not enough to be significant for probably over 90% of businesses using Shopify.

Subscription-based websites are fine for small business, but if you want to make proper revenues from retailing (eCommerce) and the web, you need to look deeper.

A Cheap Option – where you try to short cut

It’s so tempting to take a highly adaptable Platform like WordPress and try and use it for eCommerce, I know an ERP solution that is literally building their future on WordPress and still charging an absolute fortune for it.

Trouble is they are forgetting a crucial factor.  WordPress is a Blogging tool – everything else is extra.  I think Automatic, the company behind WordPress would like WordPress to be more than a Blogging Tool, but they run the real risk of disruption of their massive user base.

In short, if what they say is true and 300million websites use WordPress and most of those are Blogs and Informational websites (we can tell this because Woocommerce the most popular eCommerce Plugin available has only been downloaded 4million times).  We can expect either WordPress to massively lose popularity or Blogging will continue to be the primary function of WordPress and importantly not eCommerce.

It is a bit like trying to fry eggs and bacon in a small saucepan, you can do it, but would you recommend it?

The reason businesses use WordPress for their eCommerce is that it is a bit cheaper and also it can be easier to manage/admin.  Does it do a good job, in our opinion increasingly less so.  As time goes on we have to recommend it less and less.

A full option – eCommerce software is what is because it does the job

So we come to Magento eCommerce, well the first thing to say is that there are plenty of other specialist eCommerce solutions from Fyneworks to BigCommerce, OSCommerce and many many more.  But Magento rose in the past to be the number one solution, with a free community offering and a £17,000/year enterprise version.  Recently Adobe brought Magento for a cool $6billion.  Magento has a future sort of right?

The issue facing Magento is that it went from a very reliable and steady platform to an all-new version that couldn’t be upgraded.  You had to start again.  The history of accounts, orders, customers and products all had to be re-written, and while this process started in 2015,  four years later Magento is still supporting older versions of its platform because so many businesses have failed to transfer across.  What should have been a dream ticket for Businesses is actually a farcical nightmare for their systems integration.

However, we’re finding increasingly, Magento V2 is coming of age, the upgrades, the benefits, the improvements are all finally starting to make sense.  Magento is starting to make sense again.  And as always the proof is in the pudding, Sales on newer Magento websites that we build out-perform all other platforms. Pretty much completely.

Magento is for the dedicated eCommerce Business looking to maximise their potential online.

Conclusion

If you are looking at building a genuine eCommerce business in today’s online world, then there should be no short cut, no half measures, you need to go for the best.  Magento is still the best eCommerce platform we have come across or had the pleasure of working with.  The only caveat is, you need to be prepared to invest.