For more than a decade, business have relied on the Magento ecommerce platform to improve the look, content and functionality of their digital commerce offering.
Built on open-source technology, Magento boasts SEO, marketing and catalogue management tools, enabling users to develop a retail platform to take their business to the next level, whether that’s a multinational company with customers worldwide or a niche online boutique.
The beauty of Magento is that it’s flexible and scalable, with three distinct options – including a an open-source edition – making it suitable for any size of company.
But while it sounds great on paper, how user-friendly is the platform? And how long will it take for your team to learn how to get the best out of it if they’re not already familiar with coding?
How it works
It’s fair to say that Magento has a reputation for being one of the more challenging platforms on the market.
Many systems are intended for simple online shops that are straightforward to build and manage; however, most are not flexible in terms of features and scalability, making them unsuitable for growing businesses with exacting requirements around user experience.
One of Magento’s advantages is that it can be scaled up or down depending on business requirements.
Brands love it because it can grow with them, while it delivers an effective customer journey thanks to dynamic search features and almost limitless customisation.
The platform can support even the most ambitious businesses – it can take up to 100,000 orders an hour and host up to half a million products on a single website – while the shopping cart allows for up to 50 payment gateway integrations.
Magento Open Source is free to develop and is perfect for business owners who want to keep an eye on costs. However, it is most commonly combined with plug-ins to create a custom platform.
It also offers you the chance to really make your platform your own, regardless of the size of your business, with a sizeable range of templates and themes available to help you develop an effective platform.
It’s also great from an SEO point of view. Magento integrates the latest SEO practices to help stores hit their desired positions in the search engine and outrun the competition.
Speaking in code
While it’s not necessary to have extensive coding experience to use Magento, a working knowledge of common languages and commands will be useful.
HTML is used for developing the front end; this and CSS are found in the template files used for introducing themes. A knowledge of PHP will enable you to complete tasks such as repeating sets of products, while XML is used to edit page layout. A familiarity with JavaScript is useful for working on the front end.
If you’re not au fait with these, don’t worry – online training resources are available.
In fact, to get the most from the platform, a course delivered by Magento developers, offering hands-on practical development, as well as an overview of the platform’s capabilities, will enable you to make rapid progress.
The Magento Devchannel offers videos on topics such as how to install Magento, useful commands for developers and how to build a custom theme.
If you’re weighing up whether it’s worth investing the time and effort in getting to grips with Magento, get in touch with our team.