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What eCommerce platform are you planning on using you’re your online store?  Perhaps you are considering Shopify, or Bigcommerce.  In fact, nearly 20% of all eCommerce sites use Magento.  We thought it would be useful to give you a rundown of the main features you can expect if you choose to create your own Magento store.

Magento eCommerce Features

The Magento platform has one of the most extensive feature lists you are likely to come across.  This is one of the main reasons why it is rated so highly and why this platform is a favourite amongst large corporations.  Here’s a breakdown of the most important areas Magento covers:

  • Site management
  • SEO
  • Product browsing
  • Checkout, payment and shipping
  • Marketing, conversions and promotions
  • Persistent shopping
  • Customer service
  • Order management

Magento Community

The Magento platform uses open source.  This means that if you opt for a Magento store, you will gain access to a huge community of programmers, developers, project managers, bloggers, CEO’s and product managers.  You name it, there will likely be someone to help you out in the Magento community.  This community also makes sure that everyone is on the same page.  It is particularly safe and always speedy.  The regular updates they offer help to fulfil the needs of their different end users.

Mobile Experience

The Magento platform is also combined with HTML5 technology, which helps to maximize your overall shopping experience on mobile.  This optimisation also means that image sizes and video can be adjusted to ensure match the size of your mobile device.  Plus, customisation is also easy and the handy built-in drag and drop feature helps to create a classy mobile experience.

Enabling Star Rankings in Your Magento Store

If your Magento store sells products, genuine customer reviews can be a vital way to ensure you enjoy more sales.  Magento offers god review functionality, which is generally not enabled for star ratings if you are using the default settings.

It’s actually super easy to check whether or not your review stars are enabled.  The easiest way to do this is to simply browse to a product you like the look of and try to add a review.  If there is no way to leave a star rating for this product, then you will need to learn how to enable star rankings in your Magento store.  You can find out how to do this below.

Enabling Magento Review Stars

To enable Magento review stars, you’ll need to log in to the Admin back-end of your store.  From there, you’ll be able to browse to the Reviews and Ratings section.  You can then click the Manage Ratings button.  Once you have opened this section, there are generally three default ratings shown.  These include price, value and quality.

In the back-end of your Magento store, you’ll be able to click Add New Rating and then the rating information screen will appear.  For your new default value, simply enter ‘overall rating’ and your sort order can be zero.

Then you can simply save your work and then head to the front-end of your Magento store.  When you try and add a review, you should now have a row of stars.