Magento Commerce is an ecommerce platform that drives conversions by giving online merchants the key elements, tools, and technologies needed to deliver a great customer experience. Customers want to buy more and will buy more—if you make the shopping experience easy and relevant to them.

What does great customer experience look like?

The way customer’s see it, the best retail experiences are the easiest ones. From research on products to payment, on to delivery, you need to keep the customer experience simple and consistent across all your assets, whether online or in a brick-and-mortar store.

It puts the customer in control and lets them engage with your brand on their terms, when, where, and how they want. It gives them visibility into all their interactions with your brand in one convenient place seamlessly across all devices. A highly mobile experience that’s accessible everywhere.

This is quite a challenge to provide all these things customers are looking for in an online shopping experience. However, Magento, more than any other ecommerce solution, can meet their expectations.

Creating a Positive Customer Experience

The ecommerce marketplace has grown tremendously in just a few years. With expectations of customers also growing, your business needs to adapt to new trends in attitudes, demographics and consumer preferences.

With so many choices and information available, it isn’t enough to simply meet your customers’ needs or offer low prices. People can compare prices with a few quick clicks and are easily distracted by your competitors’ latest promotions and offerings and then post reviews within minutes of making a purchase.

You must create positive shopping experiences to compete in the online marketplace and keep your customers engaged and coming back. To do that, at a minimum, you must do the following things:

Provide excellent customer service – create positive shopping experiences and outcomes by using live, person-to-person communication via chat or phone. By engaging personally with customers, you create lasting impressions and impart loyalty to your brand. You need to respond to issues and get them fixed fast, whether customers are returning a damaged product or making a report.

Magento works with Premier Technology Partners that develop essential technologies for delivering great customer service with help desk extensions that integrate seamlessly with Magento. These allow you to organize efficient customer support for your online store. With the ability to set up unlimited departments or moderators, customers receive faster and more accurate replies.

Have one source of product data for all your touchpoints – It should be easy for your customers to find the information they need, in their local language, whether they’re shopping online or in your store. Magento Commerce has product information management technologies which can efficiently serve product information that’s relevant to all your customers everywhere. A wide selection of language packs is available to take your business global.

Give customer’s multiple payment options – Customers want flexibility. They need to have a variety of options for payment, shipping, and delivery. With Magento Commerce, you have multiple payment gateways and delivery options that best meet customer needs. By allowing customers to pay for and get their products how they want, you can dramatically increase conversions.

Set up your store with at least two payment processing options. More is better as people want to see the payment options they prefer. Pay Pal is already integrated into the platform and is popular and easy to use. Almost any of the many payment gateways can be set up. Choose the ones that match your needs. If you are doing global sales include Amazon Simple Pay or others that target worldwide sales.

With the Instant Purchase Checkout option, you can boost conversion rates for returning shoppers. Customers can use stored payment and shipping information to skip steps in checkout for faster and easier processing, especially for mobile shoppers.

Shipping and delivery – To attract new customers and promote repeat business you need to have fast and convenient shipping and delivery options. Shops with a variety of shipping methods and carriers have higher conversion rates. Magento Commerce has extensive functionality you can use for order processing, shipping rates, and shipping labels. UPS, USPS, FedEx, and DHL can be fully integrated into your store.

Tip – Make sure your shipping options are displayed on your checkout page and homepage empathizing how fast and transparent it is.

Customers want transparency – Let customers see the status of their orders, shipments, and returns and deliveries made by your shipping partners. Use this advanced ecommerce platform’s integrated Delivery Experience Management solutions to ensure that you are able to deliver customers’ orders how and when they expect.

Deliver a personalized customer experience – Shoppers expect brands to deliver personalized journeys across all relevant retail channels, your online store, brick-and-mortar store, your mobile app, social platforms, etc. Magento is a powerful omnichannel marketing customer engagement platform. It combines both real-time on-site browsing behavior and transactional data to offer a seamless and engaging shopping experience across all touch points.

Data-driven customer engagement allows you to send relevant and personalized messages to customers wherever they are and to whichever device they are using. Tailor every communication to the individual customer. From preference-based content to target product recommendations, you can make sure every touch point is relevant, contextual, and complementary to the customer journey.

If you can do these basic things you will attract many customers and have many conversions.

With all this advanced functionality, here are some more reasons to choose Magento Commerce as your ecommerce platform:

Why Choose Magento

• With Magento Commerce, you can create unique and engaging shopping experiences while offering security and performance.
• With enterprise performance and scale, and powerful business tools, it keeps you ahead of progressively complex business processes and increasing consumer demands.
• This advanced ecommerce platform automates business workflows, captures real-time customer data, and performs with technologies developed by Magento ecommerce partners.
• With thousands of extensions in the Magento Marketplace, you can customize your storefront and add extra functionality to further enhance the customer experience.
• Supports multi-stores from the same backend. Each store can be configured to have its own product catalog, yet can be managed from the same admin dashboard.
• You will have full control over both the front end and the back end of your online store. This allows full customization, controlling exactly how you want it to look and what features it has.
• Magento has a supportive community of other users, developers and service providers. This is a very useful support system and resource for new Magento users.
• Magento delivers the ultimate omnichannel experience for the easiest possible shopping for customers, boosting sales. By integrating all channels, you’ll have a single view of the customer.

Magento Commerce has many built-in ecommerce features, more than any of its competitors.

• Inventory management
• Handling shipping charges
• Coupon management
• Multiple payment gateway options
• API for web services
• Built-in multilingual support
• Optimized for mobiles and tablets
• SEO features built-in
• Customer groups
• Product bundles
• Newsletter management
• Marketing tools
• Site management features
• Order processing
• Customer service
• Gifts

In the Magento Marketplace, you can find over 5000 extensions to further enhance the customer experience and functionality of your ecommerce website.

Scalable Ecommerce Solution

Magento is highly scalable, with the right hardware and configuration it can easily support the needs of both small businesses and big enterprises. If you’re a small business and are new to ecommerce there are solutions not as heavyweight and are easier to set up that can do the job such as Magento Community, a free solution that delivers just about everything you could need for a small business.

However, if you are an established business and have a budget and time to invest, Magento Commerce (formerly Magento Enterprise) is a great solution for crafting an exceptional experience. The commercial version is designed to work with bigger e-commerce stores that have thousands of products, heavy traffic and a large number of sales. If your business is small and you expect it to grow a lot – then consider just starting with Commerce as moving from Community takes time and money.

Contact PrimeView for Magento Commerce Development

Magento Commerce has a user-friendly and intuitive interface for site owners or administrators to take care of the business without too much of a learning curve. But backend development work such as adding extensions and creating a highly customized site takes experienced developers who know PHP, a server-side programming language.

PrimeView’s expert Magento developers can help you create an eCommerce website that meets and exceeds your vision. Contact us today and tell us about your eCommerce ideas and needs. Our Scottsdale and Phoenix, Arizona web design team will deliver the customer experience for your shop that will make it a success. We can also offer ecommerce support and effective digital marketing services to help your brand get to the top of the SERPS.

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More and more people are taking to the Internet to open their own entrepreneurial businesses and online stores. There are many advantages to choosing to sell online rather than in a brick and mortar store: not having to pay rental fees on a storefront, not needing to pay for utilities such as electricity or water, not having to pay for maintenance or even a staff to aid in the selling.

Why sell online?

By all accounts, it is simply more cost effective to get started online with a business rather than opening an actual store, as there is ultimately less risk and less capital needed. Nearly anyone can sell online through a variety of shopping websites or even social media pages. Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr now have integrated “buy” buttons and business page options that allow users to easily buy right from the site. You can get started immediately, with very little effort necessary.

However, for individuals, groups, or entities that truly aim to launch an e-commerce presence that is above the regular buying and selling online, it becomes imperative to create one’s own shopping website. As with opening one’s own brick and mortar store, however, the groundwork and the system that you will erect needs to be the best fit for your business.

The two major options

The two of the most popular options available online are between two e-commerce software systems: Shopify and Magento.

Shopify is a licensed software that ultimately gives individuals and brands complete control of the features, look, and feel of their website. The customization options are endless, and Shopify is a near-universal tool available to everyone in the world who requires a more customized user experience for their own e-commerce website. It can be applied to virtually any type of website for e-commerce, from selling individual niche items to businesses that cater to a large base.

Magento is another powerful software, open-source, that has steadily been gaining in popularity as well as quickly becoming the latest standard in e-commerce software. Being open-source software, it means that it’s even more customizable as well as completely open for absolutely anyone to use with or without a license. Users can apply Magento in a variety of ways, even customizing the code to best adapt to what they need it to provide for their online business. Currently, Magento is now in its second iteration at Magento 2.

Which version is right for you?

As with anything, there are pros and cons for either one. These are quite a few differences between them, so let us look into what they have to offer in terms of:

Availability and Setup

Let’s begin with the availability and setup of each one. Shopify, being a commercial and licensed software, will obviously cost you some money to procure for its full capabilities. It is a hosted solution, which means that your store will be based on Shopify’s servers. There is a support system in Shopify that will already have this system installed, setup, and configured as needed.

Magento, on the other hand, is free, being an open-source software. The downside of this means that you will have to find your own hosting, and you will have to install, set up, and configure it yourself before any customization can begin.

This means that if you are a small business owner looking to start up on your own, Shopify would be far easier to use given that it already provides hosting, software, and support built right in. It would cost money, but it’s a lot easier for you to make use of. Magento, on the other hand, being open source, would still require work before you can even begin using it. You may need the help of a web developer who understands this software’s coding for it to be installed and subsequently used as needed. This may be easier for companies who can afford to hire their own developers.

Inventory

Both Shopify and Magento have a large inventory management capability. Users can put any number of products or items in their online store through these systems easily. An e-commerce store lives and dies by what it puts up to sell, so this is one of the major concerns, particularly as many sites that host e-commerce tend to have a certain limit to items being sold and other similar restrictions.

Themes and Templates

Both Shopify and Magento also work with pre-built themes that users can choose from. These theme templates can be changed and customized to better fit the brand of the company or the individual’s business. However, there is a notably larger pool of themes and templates available in Magento rather than in Shopify. Being open source, it makes sense that Magento would have more themes and templates available as many more people would be able to freely create them and make them available for use for anyone who wishes to use the system. Shopify remains restricted to what Shopify as a company intends to produce as a template or theme for its users.

This means that customizing in Shopify might take a little more work than in Magento which, with its mass amounts of custom themes, would probably have what you need already.

Apps and Add-Ons

Magento and Shopify are themselves pieces of software; to make it even more useful, you can add custom add-ons to them. These include things like integration of e-mail marketing, widgets, payment options, and other additions that would not only make the customer experience easier but also make it a lot easier for the company to keep track of customer data.
Again, being open source, Magento has far more offerings in terms of apps and add-ons that can be used, while Shopify’s are extremely limited, as not many people will have access to the code that will allow them to develop them.

Multilingual capabilities

If you expect to reach customers beyond the English-speaking sphere, Magento may be the better bet as it fully supports multiple languages for your e-commerce site. Shopify doesn’t allow multilingual capabilities and restricts you to a single language throughout the website. This may limit your user base, as not everyone may speak the single language on your site.

All in all, both are excellent. Whichever one selected would largely depend on the company’s target, resources, the need for customization, and how many people they want their products to reach. SMEs and entrepreneurs might make a great start on Shopify, but bigger companies who demand more customization and more abilities may be better off with Magento operated by their own web developers.