Why choose Magento?

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Hussey coding blog!

In the big wide world of e-commerce, there are several options for you to choose from when building an online store. You have Shopify, Woocommerce, Bigcommerce and Magento, among a host of others, trying to convince you to use their product so that you can sell yours.
 
There is an ocean of stats, reviews, blogs, vlogs and user experiences online that all try to answer your big question, How do I find the store builder that's right for me?
This blog seeks to help you answer that very question. If you've been reading our blog for any length of time, you'll know by now that Hussey Coding specialises in Magento development and that we believe Magento is easily the best and most versatile store builder on the market today! Home to over 300,000 companies like Coca-Cola, Ford and Nike, Magento proves every day that it can compete with the top names in the industry.
 
In this blog, we're going to be looking at the pros and cons of a Magento 2 store and finding out why there were 2 versions as we ask the big question ...

Before we begin, it's important to note that we at Hussey Coding are Magento experts but we are in no way sponsored by or work for Adobe, Magento or any of their divisions. All of the findings and opinions expressed in this article, both for and against Magento are strictly our personal observations and conclusions.

Ok, with that down, let's get into...

Magento is easily one of the most popular open-source e-commerce platforms on the market. The first thing you need to understand about Magento is that it is multi-functional and I mean massively multi-functional!

Using some coding wizardry, you can make Magento do pretty much anything you want it to do as there are little to no limits within its framework. Because of this, you can customise your store to meet all of your needs. You don’t even have to have a traditional store if you don’t want to, say you just want an index site where you can show off all your lovely products or services but not sell anything directly, not a problem, Magento can do that for you. Would you like to integrate third-party services? No problem, Magento can do that too!

Magento is great for businesses of any size, from large to small, whether you are starting your e-commerce adventure or have been trading online for several years Magento is great as you can start with the product that best fits you and as your business grows, Magento will grow with you.
Do you already have a store somewhere else but want to switch to Magento? That’s not an issue, Magento makes it easy to migrate existing stores from other e-commerce sites and, if your worried that once you migrate your store you won’t be able to use Magento then they've thought of that too, head on over to u.magento.com to get training, support and even get your Magento certification.

When either migrating to Magento or starting out you will eventually want Magento to do something for you that doesn’t come as standard, however, this is not a problem, just head over to marketplace.magento.com where you can find extensions, themes and customer support.

Not sure the extension you are looking at is the best fit for your store? Just ask one of the largest communities for help, the Magento community is massive! It is full of store owners, partners, developers who are all ready, willing and able to help you expand the functionality of your store.
Looking for something really unique? Then head to Developerconnection.co.uk, where you can find skilled developers who can develop new extensions for you depending on your stores needs.

All new content in the marketplace must comply with a code standards test to ensure the code is up to scratch. But even if a lousy line of code does happen to get through or there is an extension that people dislike, the community will let you know about it. The Magento community brings with it a vast wealth of knowledge and experience. It has even been known for some community code to make it into the code base of Magento itself. Almost every version update has a multitude of community bugfixes, showing us not only that the community treat Magento seriously but that Magento values the community as well. A great example of this is MSI (Multi-Source Inventory), this is the first sizeable functionality released as part of Magento which was developed entirely by the community, to learn more about MSI just follow this link https://docs.magento.com/m2/ce/user_guide/catalog/inventory-management.html

We can't speak for other developers here but, if you were to contact us at Hussey Coding for an out of the box store, we estimate it would take somewhere between 3-4 weeks to get you up and running. Obviously the more you want to do, the longer it will take. Having said that, we would recommend you build a basic store first, helping to get the money coming in and then build as you go along. Magento sports a packed roster of unique features due to constant development, this will give you an incredible amount of creative control over the workings and design of your store.

 

We’ve said that Magento is all singing and all dancing, which is great, but you're the one who’s in control, which means that you are going to need a good knowledge of how the backend of the store works. This is going to take time to learn as it can be quite daunting with the number of configurations that you have available to you.
Also If you are new to Magento then you may need someone to come and do all of the foundational work for you. It can be quite complex to learn so if you are going it alone or migrating your store, make sure you take the time to learn everything you need to. Of course, this is a conditional con as the more you learn, understand and use the backend of your store the easier this will be for you.

If you find that you need more functionality than Magento offers out of the box you might be able to find an extension to help you out, otherwise, you are going to want to get a developer involved and that’s where things can get expensive depending on your individual needs. Even with the free open source version of Magento, you may come to a time where you want an extension or two and some, not all, will charge. However, this again is a conditional con as the more money you make and invest in store development, the more you’ll be able to cover the cost.

Our last con is again subject to circumstance as it only applies to Magento1 users. All official support for M1 ended in June of 2020. You will still be able to get some support form independent developers but the majority of people, including us, will encourage you to move to M2 due to the simple fact that it’s better.

Now moving from M1 to M2 is no easy task, in fact from a coding perspective it would require you to build your store from scratch, and that, depending on your income, can be pricey to do but I cannot stress to you enough how important it is to migrate to M2 if you haven't done so already. Yes it might be expensive to do and you can continue to run your store on M1 however, you will end up paying more to run your M1 store in the long run as it will become a more and more specialised area with fewer developers dedicating time to it, there are no more security patches or updates coming for M1, leaving your store and business incredibly vulnerable to cybercrime as technology moves on and any competitors you have who are using M2 will have the edge on you from all the updated and new features available to them as part of their M2 package.

So if Magento is one of the most popular e-commerce store builders and boasts this incredible community of shop owners and developers helping and creating content, why create another version?

Since its release back in 2008 a lot has changed in the coding world. Firstly, Magento is built on PHP, the principles of PHP have changed since M1s creation. Secondly, with time things become outdated, this has happened to the base code of M1.
Magento 2 is a complete rebuild of M1, it is bigger, faster, stronger if you will. Using newer principles and a better code base M2 can do all that M1 did only better. As someone who has experience with both M1 and M2 stores, I have personally found Magento 2s store to be far more user friendly.

So what's new with M2?
Firstly if you are familiar with the M1 store, you will notice that the names have changed.
M1s Community Edition has become M2s Open source, Enterprise edition has become Commerce edition and now, exclusively to M2, we have Commerce Cloud. We will be looking more in-depth at what they all do and features they bring in our next blog.

M2 offers a highly improved, easy to use administration interface, easier product creation, improved caching (making it faster), newly supported payment gateways such as PayPal and WorldPay, a business to business module, new file structure with easier customization, a better code base and a vastly improved search function just to name a few.

In conclusion, Magento is a highly flexible, versatile store builder with an array of extensions and support from both Magento and the Magento community available. Can it be costly? Yes, it can but, the fact is you will be paying for a high-quality product that will enable you to further your store's functionality and profitability.

If you need to find a developer to help you with migration, store building or extension integration then look no further than Developerconnection.co.uk the new Magento project marketplace, find the right developer or project for you today!

Thanks for joining us today for this edition of the Hussey Coding blog. As always our contact details are below so, hop on over and join the conversation. Until then, stay safe and have a great day.

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