Magento Open Source: What is it, and Why Use Magento Ecommerce to Start an Online Business?

• What is Magento Ecommerce Solution?
• Magento Open Source Vs Adobe Commerce Cloud
• What’s Magento Ecommerce Market Share?
• Why Use Magento Ecommerce for Starting an Online Business?
  • Support for Latest Technologies
  • An Open-source Ecommerce Platform
  • Magento PWA Architecture
  • Multi-platform Integration
  • SEO-friendliness of Magento Ecommerce
  • Reliable Magento Open Source Partners
  • Analytics and Reporting
  • Advertising and Marketing
  • Payment and Shipping
  • Enhanced Security
  • Choose Hosting of Your Choice
• The Easy Way to Start With Magento Commerce
• Conclusion

What is Magento Ecommerce Solution?

Magento is an open source ecommerce platform that offers its merchants customizability, built-in ecommerce functionalities, and third-party plugin, theme and tool integration. It’s suitable for any ecommerce business, from a flower shop to a large fashion brand to a B2B business.

In this piece, we’ll take a look at Magento, now rebranded to Adobe Commerce, and see why it’s the best solution for starting an ecommerce business.

Magento Open Source Vs Adobe Commerce Cloud

Currently, there are 2 Magento solutions for building an ecommerce store. Both Adobe Commerce Cloud and Magento Open Source provide continuous new updates, features and fixes through major and minor releases. These let merchants focus on their business and stay ahead of their competitors.

Adobe Commerce Cloud

This solution was previously known as Magento Commerce and marketed as the enterprise version of Magento. A self hosted solution on Adobe Cloud, it offers integration of some great Adobe tools, and automatically takes care of all major and minor updates. Adobe Commerce customers also get premium support but since this is not an open source solution, they may not have much freedom to customize.

Pros of Adobe Commerce

• Adobe Commerce offers a multi-brand feature, so you can manage multiple brands from a single platform. You can display products from different brands and their pricing structure, and customize checkout based on your audience, location or brand.
• Adobe Commerce has B2B integrated functionality, which lets customers self-manage their account. It categorizes buyers into different tiers and assigns them specific roles and permissions. It also helps track quotes, purchase approvals, manage credits, and more.
• The Business Intelligence feature in Adobe Commerce offers rich visualization and powerful reporting tools to better understand business growth. It offers business insights, from the average order value to the customer lifetime value and their retention rate. Also, Adobe Commerce customers can create their own customized dashboards with multiple reports and automate those reports as well.
• It lets you access support at any point.
• There are excellent marketing tools, like the Product Recommendation feature which automatically suggests different products to each customer based on shopper behavior. This feature is powered by Adobe Sensei.

Magento Open Source

This is an open source version of Magento. It gives merchants the complete freedom to choose any Magento hosting solution and customize it however they want. 

There are a wide range of Magento extensions, theme providers and third party service providers to make Magento a perfect solution for any ecommerce business. Adobe handles major Magento releases, and Magento Association handles minor updates.

Pros of Magento Open Source

• Magento Open Source gives store owners the option to customize their ecommerce store according to their need or business model. It’s therefore great for developers.
• Magento Open Source ecommerce solution offers merchants the freedom to choose any service provider of their choice.
• You can easily install any third party Magento 2 extension and tools from Marketplace or a service provider.
• Merchants can easily receive help related to their ecommerce store from the Magento community.

All this must have made clear that Adobe Commerce fully manages the hosting server but it restricts customization. On the other hand, Magento Open Source offers customizability, but doesn’t handle hosting. 

Cloudways managed Magento hosting offers the best of both worlds with Magento Open Source, so you can benefit both from Magento’s customization options and Cloudways’ ease of hosting management. You can request our Magento demo store to check the blazing fast performance of Cloudways managed hosting.

What’s Magento Ecommerce Market Share?

Magento Open Source is a very secure and powerful ecommerce CMS. That makes it attractive to businesses with huge traffic and a good brand image in the ecommerce market.

W3Techs

As the graph shows, Magento is mostly used by sites that have high traffic. Here are some other interesting facts related to Magento

• Magento powers 0.9% of all sites using a CMS, which means it powers 0.6% of all websites. (Source)
• Magento is amongst the top 10 CMSes used for building ecommerce sites. (Source)
• The United States, United Kingdom, Germany and Netherlands are the top 4 Magento users. (Source)
• Magento is amongst the top 5 open-source CMS. (Source)
• LifeStyle, home & garden, ecommerce & shopping, and computer electronics & technology are top categories that prefer Magento Open Source. (Source)
• Currently, around 171,800 merchants are using Magento. (Source)

Why Use Magento Ecommerce for Starting an Online Business?

Ecommerce sites usually get high traffic, and as such need a customizable, reliable, and scalable ecommerce solution like Magento. Magento updates offer not just the latest technologies, but also new features, improvements and fixes. 

Let’s look at some of the reasons behind Magento ecommerce being the preferred choice for ecommerce merchants. 

Support for Latest Technologies

Magento Open Source is built on the Zend framework, which supports both Nginx and Apache server technologies. For optimum ecommerce performance, it needs Redis and Varnish cache. Magento also supports the latest version of PHP, MariaDB, MySQL, Composer, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch, and other technologies, so Magento ecommerce merchants always get what’s best for their ecommerce business.

An Open-source Ecommerce Platform

Magento ecommerce’s open-source solution lets merchants develop their Magento any way they want. They can integrate third-party solutions, or add/develop any functionality in their ecommerce store.

Magento PWA Architecture

Magento ecommerce solution can be integrated with any PWA solution to give an ecommerce store the feel and look of a native app. This gives an excellent combination of Magento website and native app.

Magento PWA improves the shopping experience through lightning-fast speed, app-like performance, push notifications, offline mode, flexibility, easy-to-use interface, and many other necessary features.

Multi-platform Integration 

Magento Open Source merchants can enhance store functionality through third-party extensions from Magento marketplace or any other extension provider.

SEO-friendliness of Magento Ecommerce

Organic channel is one of the key mediums of conversions for an ecommerce store, and SEO is the most fruitful channel for this. Magento Ecommerce CMS has an SEO-friendly infrastructure and built-in features which makes it easy for merchants to rank their product on search engines and get more sales.

Reliable Magento Open Source Partners

Magento’s partners have played a vital role in the success of Magento ecommerce. Merchants will always prefer an ecommerce platform with great partners. Magento Open Source partners run the gamut between third party solutions to Magento agencies.

Analytics and Reporting

A strong analytics and reporting system is necessary to identify an ecommerce business’s KPIs and success. With Magento Open Source, merchants get precise reports like:

• Sales report
• Tax report
• Abandoned shopping cart report
• Best viewed products report
• Best purchased products report
• Low stock report
• Search terms report
• Product reviews report
• Coupon usage report
• Total sales invoiced report

Advertising & Marketing

Magento Open Source offers some great marketing features to keep customers engaged. For promotion, you can:

• Cross-sell products
• Generate coupon code and identify its usage
• Manage newsletters and polls
• Receive support for price variations based on groups and quantity
• Use integrated third party marketing and promotion tools

Payment and Shipping

The Magento ecommerce platform offers a wide variety of payment options and integrations for ease of payment. Magento merchants can also choose system-generated shipping options, or integrate any external solutions to improve customer experience.

Enhanced Security

Magento Open Source continuously offers new security updates and fixes. Its security features include:

• Better Password Management: Magento Open Source has improved hashing algorithms (SHA-256) for password management and now supports Argon2ID13 through the PHP sodium extension.
• Improved Prevention of Cross-Site Scripting: Magento ecommerce platform has adopted methods that regulate release of data in output source.
• Flexible File System Ownership and Permissions: Magento Open Source has improved file permission. New permission can also be set.

Choose Hosting of Your Choice

The Magento ecommerce platform gives merchants freedom to choose any ecommerce hosting provider, whether it’s shared hosting (not recommended), virtual private server, cloud hosting or managed Magento hosting solution (most popular).

Since Magento targets stable business, it needs a stable hosting environment. Cloudways managed Magento hosting is a recommended solution for this.

The Easy Way to Start With Magento Commerce

Generally, to start a Magento ecommerce site, the server first needs to be set. Then the Magento Open Source version would be downloaded or uploaded from local setup, and finally optimized on the server. 

Configuration, integration, store and server management are usually complex tasks that take a lot of time. But Cloudways is a one-stop solution that offers ease of server management and lets you launch your Magento store in just a few clicks.

Here’s how easily a Magento ecommerce store can be set up on Cloudways.

Step 1: Fill the relevant details and sign up to Cloudways Platform.

Step 2: Click on the Launch button for a new server.

Step 3: Select your Magento application.

Step 4: Fill the server and application details.

Step 5: Select the provider, the server size, and its location.

Step 6: Verify all the information and click on the Launch Now button.

It may take some time to launch the server and install the Magento application.

Now your Magento server is all set to be used.

Server Management Interface

Application Management Interface

Conclusion

Magento Open Source is a robust and reliable solution for online businesses that want to grow. It offers flexibility and freedom through an ecommerce solution that fulfills business needs in every possible way from development to promotion. 

It offers great features, third party solutions and customization. All this combines to make the Magento CMS a perfect solution. All that’s needed to complete the picture is a top managed hosting provider, and luckily, we can fill that gap for you!