What is Magento?

Did you know that Magento is a leading e-commerce platform used worldwide? Today, we are going to explore many things about Magento like, what is Magento? Why choose Magento over other e-commerce platforms for building your online store and etc?

Choosing a platform for developing a website can be a daunting task. There are various options for creating a website, depending on your needs. You can have a custom website which uses programming languages like JavaScript, Python, PHP, C#, and others. There are other options available as well. For example, you can have a website which uses CMS platforms like WordPress, Magento, Drupal, Joomla, and etc.

Today, we are going to explore one of the world's top leading eCommerce CMS platforms, "Magento". At the time of this writing and according to pagely.com, Magento is ranked 3rd in e-commerce platforms with 10% of the market share after WooCommerce and Shopify.

So, let's begin:

 

A short summary of the history of Magento

Magento has released two big versions of Magento, Magento 1 and Magento 2. Magento 1 was launched in the year of 2008 on March 31 and Magento 2, beta version, was more recently launched on November 17, 2015. When Magento was first released back in March 31, of 2008 it was owned by a company called Varien. Varien later sold a portion of its shares to the well known company eBay which later fully acquired Magento. eBay later sold the software to a company called Permira. Today, the well known company Adobe owns the Magento software.

 

Why choose Magento over other platforms for your E-Commerce business?

Magento is a leading e-Commerce website development platform. Magento is an open-source platform which is mainly built using the PHP and Zend Framework language. Magento comes in two versions — 

  • Magento Community version which is free to use. The community version is great for all kinds of small businesses. 
  • Magento Enterprise, paid version. This version will cost you at least $22,000/year. This version is best suited for well established companies.

There have been various issues which have been addressed and fixed in the latest version of Magento. Magento 2 has made use of more updated technology and modules which make it faster, more secure, and more useful in terms of the end user's experience. Going forward we will discuss only Magento 2. At the time of this writing, the stable version of Magento is v2.3.2.

Today there are many well known brands who use and trust the Magento software for their business everyday. Coca Cola, Nike, Vizio and Ford just to name a few.

There are more than 250K+ plus stores currently running on Magento and the number is increasing everyday. This platform is one of the fastest-growing platforms in e-commerce technology. One of the reason behind that is because you can easily extend the look and functionality of your store at any level. Magento is also supported by thousands of Certified Magento Developers with hundreds of Magento extensions available to help easily extend and add new functionality to your store.

  • Magento is one of the world's Leading E-Commerce Platforms
  • Out-of-the-box themes - Luma, a demonstration theme and Blank, a basis for custom theme creation
  • Open Source edition available (Free to Use)
  • Easy to understand and manage the backend CMS 
  • Thousands of Certified Magento Developers
  • Easy to understand product & category management
  • SEO Optimized platform
  • Customer-Centric platform
  • Lots of great customizable Magento 2 Themes and Magento 2 Extensions available
  • Very customizable and extendable
  • Multilanguage support, a great feature for stores opened for different regions.
  • Multicurrency support
  • Many other popular ecommerce features available by default like Wishlist, Product and Category level Discounts, Coupons, Compare Products and much more
  • Proven secure software solution
  • Built in payment solutions like PayPal, BrainTree and etc
  • Fraud protection by Signifyd
  • Built in Shipping solutions like USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL and etc
  • Robust reporting on things like Abandoned Carts, Payment Settlements, Business Intelligence and etc
  • And so much more!

 

Technologies used to support Magento 2

  1. PHP - the core programming language used in Magento.
  2. PHP Framework - Magento made use of the two most popular PHP frameworks, Zend and Symphony which work behind the Magento 2 framework.
  3. PSR-4 Compliant - these are the coding standards used while building the main Magento framework. This standard declares that the namespace path will match the file path to the class.
  4. Composer - used for managing various dependencies and components on which the Magento 2 software is based on.
  5. HTML5 - used to provide the front-end structure.
  6. CSS3 - used for the styling to provide a better look and feel.
  7. SASS and LESS - preprocessors also used for styling.
  8. jQuery - used to provide some great dynamic functionality in the user interface as well as in backend things.
  9. RequireJS - used in Magento 2 to include javascript where it's needed, which ultimately speeds up the website.
  10. MySQL or MariaDB - used as the Database Management system. 
  11. Apache & Nginx - the web servers supported in Magento 2.
  12. Varnish and Redis - provides cache and page-level caching, respectively.

 

Final thoughts about Magento 2:

Magento 2 is a great platform which is mainly designed for E-Commerce businesses of all kinds. In this article we tried to cover what Magento is and all the key points which can give you a better insight into Magento 2 and how it can help your e-commerce business. If this article has helped you, please let us know below. We love to hear from all our readers!