Many e-commerce site owners are showing inclination in moving to handheld platforms permanently. They have their reasons; the engagement rate is high among the traffic that Smart devices bring and the leads get converted to sales very easily because swiping up and down is more intuitive than clicking or scrolling.
But this inclination of theirs poses some challenges before the Magento developers. If you are losing me here, then here’s the explanation as to why the Magento platform might have to bear the brunt of the stick, only because the e-commerce sites are upgrading themselves.
Some new trends
The handheld platform has given birth to some new trends, two of which are;
- The emerge of social commerce
- The rising importance of data and analytics
You may face difficulty linking social commerce to mobile devices, but there’s a link between them. To understand that link, you need to keep in mind, at times, the most insignificant of details turn out to be the real game changers.
In this case, the apparently insignificant detail is mobile users spend more time accessing the web than their desktop twins because they can access the web on-the-go. That amounts to more engagement and more networking, both of which are factors behind the social commerce seeing a sharp increase in popularity.
As for data and analytics, developers are introducing new apps every day to customize the mobile web surfing experience. These apps are released by companies of different sizes and scales. They not only promote the company but also fetch information about customer behavior.
Can Magento handle all these?
Online marketers are relentlessly developing strategies so a Magento platform supports the latest e-commerce techniques and strategies. But the problem is the strategies are not always applicable. For example, you may decide to implement a new feature on the site and end up realizing the existing shopping cart won’t allow that.
Magento has many strength areas. It is tailor made to build e-commerce platforms. Among many editions offered by Magento, one is the community edition that’s custom designed for the merchants. The biggest strength areas are responsive web design, which comes as default, availability of third party themes, social media integration and superior reporting.
To keep pace with the rising mobile trends, Magento needs to keep pace with localization and social networking. It’s a good news to Magento developers as well as to online merchants that mobile compatible configuration is pretty easy on Magento. Hence, when Smartphone and Tablet users visit Magento sites, thanks to responsive design, they don’t have any problem viewing the content or surfing through the navigation elements.
So Magento can meet the challenges that are in front of it. Having said that, the site configurations and following the updates require the involvement of efficient Magento developers, unless experienced and skilled developers take up the Magento development work, overcoming the said challenges might be a bit difficult.
Moving to Magento
A merchant might wonder whether moving to Magento would be a good idea. Well, migrating to a different CMS is not a bad idea if you want a host of custom functionalities so you could manage your business better. Suppose you have a Drupal built e-commerce site and you want to migrate to Magento because it is a CMS, dedicated only for e-commerce sites.
You should go ahead with this idea because you won’t miss anything if you move to Magento. You can transfer the databases independently, the only problem is the process will take time and require a person with technical skills. Some merchants hire a programmer and rely on him for data transfer. It undoubtedly helps but the only problem with it is it’s a financially a lofty proposition.
For automated migration, merchants depend on third party services. Using such services saves them from spending money or time on programming and installing software. Using the service like a pro is all that it takes and the demo videos could render best help to the merchants in their effort to learn how to use the service.
Benefits of Magento
- An extremely versatile content management platform
Magento allows show owners to build and customize their products or services on the fly. No coding knowledge is required for content management.
- Spacious and powerful
Magento can support close to 500,000 products on a single site and handle over 80,000 orders/hour. This gives a lot of scope for future business growth. Also note that due to this extreme size, Magento has special hosting requirements for optimum speed and performance.
- Easy integration with third party applications
You can connect your ecommerce website with MailChimp, PayPal, Ebay, QuickBooks, and more. You will also be able to easily add Google Analytics and other 3rd party applications to assist you with data analysis.
- Filtered search option
Magento’s intelligent filter search option improves user experience by giving them the freedom to filter products based on a number of parameters. Magento also uses a unique search term cloud, recently viewed products, product reviews and product tag filter to come up with auto-suggested terms to the customer.
So in the conclusion, we can say that Magento is equipped to handle the challenges at this time and day. Nevertheless, Magento developers need to be creative and have foresight, so they could speculate the upcoming changes and work towards implementing the compatibility in the platform to accommodate those changes.
