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Why Magento Is The Best Choice As Your Ecommerce Platform

Whether you’ve got big plans in the ecommerce space and want to take on brands like Nieman Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman or you plan to start a boutique online website catering to a niche marketplace, your choice of an ecommerce platform is a key strategic decision that will play a role in the success of your ecommerce startup.
 

Why Magento Is The Best Choice

The size of the global ecommerce business stands at $1.7 trillion as of 2015 and it will go up to $3.6 trillion by 2019, according to eMarketer. To thrive in the online space, you will need a modern technology platform that is also evolving rapidly to keep pace with changes in technology.

Magento meets these criteria. It is an open-source platform and therefore highly customizable. There are vast numbers of Magento themes available to suit your business and aesthetic requirements.

Global mobile retail ecommerce business size will increase from $315 billion in 2015 to $669 billion in 2018, according to statista. Mobile ecommerce constitutes about 30 percent of total ecommerce business in the U.S.
 

Magento Responsive Themes

Magento responsive themes will let you build an online shopping portal that will meet high customer expectations in terms of usability. On Smartphones, usability translates to clean, clutter-free design, fast-loading and a smooth check out and payment option.
 

Magento Third-Party Software Integration

Magento lets you integrate your ecommerce website with numerous payment gateways including PayPal. You can also integrate Magento with different shipping services including international shipping. You can integrate Magento with Google Analytics and Google Shopping as well as content management systems like WordPress. You can also do Salesforce integration with Magento.
 

Magento Ecommerce Websites And Digital Marketing

When marketing turns out to be a significant business cost for even established FMCG brands, for a startup, advertising expenses can be crippling and suck a major portion of your initial investment.

Hence, making the right choices in terms of where and how to spend your advertising dollars is important.

Digital marketing rather than traditional newspaper or TV ads make far more sense as digital advertising is highly targeted and advertising budgets are not wasted.

Digital advertising has different components that can cost anything from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For a fledgling startup, placing a banner ad or display ad on the home page of The New York Times or CNN.com may not be the most savvy investment decision. Better to make smaller investments in digital advertising through Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising on search engines such as Google.

Customer acquisition, outreach, and retention efforts as well as customer service happen across multiple channels these days and social media plays an important part in all of these. In fact, more than 90 percent customers these days turn to social media for making buying decisions and more than 90 percent customers also trust products recommended by their social media peers.

Social media marketing can be an effective and low-cost tool. Facebook offers lots of options including Carousel ads.
 

Magento Ecommerce Websites and Social Media

Ecommerce businesses are naturally expected to be able to use social media more smartly and effectively than old or traditional businesses.

Using Magento as your ecommerce website platform will let you make the most of digital marketing initiatives such as social media marketing with promoted posts on Facebook, Pinterest, and promoted tweets on Twitter.

Different social media platforms require images of different sizes. So, your images should be appropriately sized.

Use of Magento responsive themes will ensure that your social media shares all display correctly for your social media followers.

Magento ecommerce development should take into account these future requirements and proceed accordingly. Magento development companies in India such as Mind Digital with extensive prior experience in executing different Magento projects for different clients will have the proper bandwidth and expertise to provide you with the necessary guidance and expertise.
 

Social Media Tricks

To connect with customers and potential customers on social media, your social media posts should be keyword optimized. So, your social media posts should contain the keywords that make sense for you as an ecommerce startup or ecommerce business.

Social content is different than sales content. Aggressively sales-oriented content will turn away customers. Social content has to be share-worthy such as interesting customer stories. News and tips related to your business segment will work as well. Educate, inform and entertain your social media followers to keep them coming back for more.
 

Magento And Content Marketing

Content marketing is a useful and cost-effective customer outreach and marketing technique. You can build customer loyalty as well as pull potential new customers into the marketing funnel by smartly using the website’s blog. The blog posts can be FAQs, tips, recipes, guidelines, training videos or anything else that might be of use to your customers.

Giant luxury department stores such as Neilan Marcus and Bergdorf Goodman not only have their online ecommerce websites but have excellent blogs as well.

(Bergdorf Goodman blog)
 

(Neiman Marcus blog)

 
And here is an online ecommerce website that does not have a blog — clearly, a missed content marketing opportunity.

(Online wedding dresses and much more but no blog)

 
Looking at a couple of custom-made shoe ecommerce websites shows one website that has an FAQ page but no blog and another website that has neither.

(Ecommerce shoes website with no blog and no FAQ page)

 

(Ecommerce website with an Faq page but no blog)

 
Clearly, many ecommerce businesses are not putting to use all the tools available to them to enlarge their customer base as well as be more friendly to customers and reach out to them. You can have a blog on your Magento ecommerce website to gain a competitive advantage over many others.
 

Magento Multi-Store, Multi-Language and Multi-Currency Features

You can create multiple Magento stores using one installation of Magento. This lets you create stores with non-English language options. You can also display product prices in different currencies to cater to customers around the world. In fact, stores can be designed to show prices in the currency of the user’s country based on his or her IP address from which the website visitor visits the site.
 

Magento Shopping Cart and Seamless Checkout Features

With Magento’s persistent shopping cart feature, online shopping becomes a seamless and user-friendly experience for users as logged-in users will be able to browse products on their mobiles while travelling to the office in the morning and the check-out and payment parts of the shopping experience in the evening.

Their shopping cart will have all the items they had added to it previously.
 

Magento Ecommerce Websites And SEO

Website SEO is critical to the success of any website but it is more so in case of ecommerce websites such as Magento ecommerce websites since the success of such a website is all about attracting customers and persuading them to buy products from the website. Ecommerce websites will typically have thousands of products and product pages not to mention site search result pages. Hence, optimizing these websites is a bit more difficult than optimizing usual websites.

Your SEO strategy should be based on data and you generate the data by performing research such as auditing your site’s SEO and doing keyword research. Keyword research will tell you what keywords will work best on your product pages. Long-tail keywords have a better chance at getting a high rank.

Competitor research is important to craft your own SEO strategy. Such research will inform you what keywords your peers and competitors are successfully targeting and you can decide whether you want to target those keywords as well or go for other keywords.
 

Some important SEO strategies for ecommerce websites are:

✓ Use unique product descriptions. Product descriptions should be unique so that Google does not treat it as duplicate content. Craft compelling sales copy that will entice visitors to consider making a purchase on your ecommerce site.

✓ Customer reviews matter. Data shows that product pages with customer reviews work better in multiple ways compared to product pages without customer reviews. Amazon and other major ecommerce sites have made customer reviews an integral part of their product pages. Inserting customer reviews also means that the page gets fresh content all the time which leads to a higher rank in Google search results.

✓ Use intuitive navigation. Ecommerce websites have become common enough now that some things about them such as product categories have become somewhat standardized. You should adopt those categories as well since you do not want the user to have to go through an entire learning curve to learn simple site navigation of your website.

✓ Integrate social media onto product pages. Since Google rankings these days are impacted by social media signals, it makes sense from an SEO perspective to add social sharing buttons for all the major, popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter.

✓ Pages should load fast. Your product pages should load fast if you want visitors to stick around. Data says people will leave your site if it takes more than three seconds to load.

✓ Optimize for mobile. As mobile shopping grows, it is critical to have a mobile-optimized Magento ecommerce website. If customers have a frustrating experience while trying to shop, they’ll likely leave and acquire a negative impression about your ecommerce site. Google also demotes sites in its search rankings if they are not optimized for mobile.
 

Magento Websites And Rich Snippets/Schema

Adding structured data to mark up your content such as by using Schema markup helps search engines like Google to make better sense of the content on your website. Google is also able to generate Rich Cards and Rich Snippets based on the structured data.

Adding microdata to your Magento product pages means the display of rich snippets on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Rich snippet displays might include a restaurant’s menu item prices, its opening and closing hours, contact number, star rating, reviews, availability and so on.

Such helpful displays in the SERP can increase click-through rates (CTR) by as much as 20 to 30 percent.

For example, a simple product page may have any of the following Schema.org tags:

✓ Name
✓ In Stock / Our of Stock
✓ Breadcrumbs
✓ Reviews (average score and number of reviews/votes)
✓ Description
✓ URL
✓ Product Image
✓ Color
✓ Price
✓ Brand
✓ Product Identifier (GTIN, ISBN, ENAN, etc)
✓ Categories
 

Outsourcing Magento Ecommerce Development

A Magento-based ecommerce website development project can be quite expensive. Outsourcing Magento development to India-based Magento development companies can lead to significant cost savings for you.
 

Other Benefits of Outsourcing Magento Ecommerce Development

Technical Expertise:

Cost benefits are not the only reason to opt for outsourcing to India. You will also get the added benefit of having highly experienced and competent Magento professionals working on your project.

Magento professionals and user experience professionals working together can deliver an ecommerce site that will provide a smooth and intuitive buying experience to customers.

Experienced Magento professionals at India-based Magento development companies will ensure that third party software integration, WordPress integration with your Magento CMS and other technical aspects of your ecommerce website work flawlessly.
 

Digital Marketing and Content Marketing Expertise:

Magento development companies in India not only provide one-time Magento ecommerce development but also continuous post-launch support as well as digital marketing and content marketing expertise.

Ecommerce business expansion takes smart planning and implementation of a carefully targeted digital marketing campaign including PPC ads and social media marketing. PPC management service provided by Mind Digital will provide help and guidance in this regard.

An comprehensive content marketing strategy will include regular blog posts on the ecommerce website’s blog as well as synchronized updates on LinkedIn and other content marketing channels like Quora and Medium. Experienced content marketing professionals at Mind Digital will ensure smooth sailing of your content marketing campaign.

A Magento installation is therefore quite a smart choice as your ecommerce installation and outsourcing Magento ecommerce development to companies such as Mind Digital is a smart business decision.