Why Magento Is Not The Best Choice For Small Businesses?

Magento, a name synonymous with ecommerce is one of the most primary choices for developing an ecommerce store. It is one of the most popular ecommerce platforms in the market. Currently, there are more than 2.5 lakh active ecommerce stores powered by Magento. This accounts for 12% of all online stores. Nearly 11 thousand Magento stores run on Magento 2, and the number is continuously increasing. You would be surprised to know that it is downloaded 5,000 times a day. Last year, 7,500 ecommerce retailers migrated to Magento from any other ecommerce platform.

All these figures are evident for the popularity of Magento. It is rich in features and has a huge community of developers, but it may be too expensive and complex for smaller retailers.

But it has been a big question whether it is the best choice for small businesses too. Hence, in this article, we have laid down the merits and demerits of using Magento for a small business.

But what is a small business? Well, philosophically no business is big or small. However, if the products in your store are from 200 to 300 and cover a limited geographical area, then you should read this article…

Magento Best Features

There are limitless benefits of Magento for an ecommerce store, hence to enlist them in a single article would be quite an arduous task and you must have gone through those articles already. However, there are some features that are like a forte of Magento. These are…

• Catalog Management:

It is a very arduous task to upload the product one by one on your ecommerce store whether these are even limited to hundreds of products. But with the product upload feature of Magento, you can add thousands of SKUs in a single import. On Magento, you can upload multiple attributes of the products such as SKU number, manufacturer name, price, product description, model, thumbnail images, URL, path, and even where on the site the product should land.

The catalog management of Magento also supports to build categories of products, EAV architecture, dynamic product attributes, etc. Some advanced features in the catalog management are comparison, wishlists, up-sell, cross-sell, related products, wish lists, etc.

• Multiple Pricing Options:

Whether it is a traditional store business, or online shopping the buyer expects a different price when buying in bulk. Hence, Magento also comes with the ability to price items differently as per the organization’s needs.

For e.g., if any customer adds a certain number of items in the shopping cart, then you can set the parameters to give the additional products at a discounted price. Also, if you change the item base price with the Magento platform then you don’t need to change the fixed prices. Without this, it would be really hard to manage the price of hundreds or thousands of items. There is also a group pricing feature in Magento. As the name indicates, this feature allows you to offer different prices for a group of customers. It is an essential feature for the B2B ecommerce stores. With this function, you can set up special prices for retail, VIPs, wholesale, and staff groups.

With Magento, you can allow hiding prices of products from those visitors who have logged in yet in the store.

• Product Alerts:

Products Alerts is another superb feature offered by the Magento. You can definitely observe an increase in the sales from these simple communications that tell interested customers when, for example, an out-of-stock product is back in stock or if a product is on sale. Simple but powerful.

• Multiple Stores:

You can reach the international borders and can expand your business globally. But for this, you need to meet the different geographical users’ needs. With Magento, you can create a multi-language ecommerce store which will load the language as per the region automatically. If you have thought about having separate stores for different industry products, this too is available with Magento.

• Exciting User Interface:

You can alter designs, and also customize themes as per the categories on Magento. With this, you can have multiple storefronts of your ecommerce store and a single backend. Suppose you have a site where on one page you are selling baby products while on the other page you are selling cosmetic products. Then you may find the need for a different theme for both pages along with different product filters, layouts, colors, etc. However, it is possible with Magento to have different themes on a single backend.

• Mobile Optimized:

In today’s time, you can’t just rely on a website that works perfectly on desktops. As the world is getting mobile, you need to have a mobile-first solution that is optimized for use on mobile devices. And when Magento 2 expert developers say, this platform is made for mobile you need to trust them. Always remember, a good quality mobile experience will lead to a higher conversion rate. And Magento 2 doesn’t forget the admin experience i.e. the backend is also mobile-friendly to easily track sales and update products from the smartphones.

• SEO Friendly:

Last but not least, Magento comes with full site SEO optimization features like index management, by which you can control which links would be passed to Google. You can alter and optimize elements for your pages, such as the Page Header and Meta Tags. Due to large databases, numerous pages and dynamic content SEO of an ecommerce platform can be a nightmare which is why making Magento SEO friendly is a huge benefit.

Demerits of Magento

While there are uncountable benefits of Magento for an online store, it also has some cons for small businesses. Here are those…

• High Cost:

If you are having a small or new business then cost is definitely a crucial factor for you. You can’t just empty your pockets for the expensive plans of an ecommerce platform. However, the Magento community edition is open-source i.e. free, aimed at startups and entrepreneurs. But the support and use of extension require payment. Also, you need to hire expert Magento developers which are also costly in comparison to the other ecommerce platform experts.

Apart from the costs of normally running the store such as ongoing maintenance costs, updates, changes to functionalities, extensions, etc. you require additional cost even for a small plugin. The enterprise edition of Magento is also very expensive, and so are the license fees.

• Complex Customization:

The slowness of loading during the customization process is one of the worst drawbacks of the Magento. It is quite complex in comparison to the Shopify. It is also true that you can configure Magento options. It is practically possible to be modified to 100%. But the slow performance of its interface, though simple, is not something you will find attractive.

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• Robust yet heavy on resources:

Magento is a scalable and robust ecommerce platform, but also a bulky and resource requiring platform. It means that you require heavy server resources to run it smoothly. This increases the operational costs of a Magento store. While the competitors of the Magento manage the domain registration, Magento does not. This platform provides the basic software but is not responsible for the technical details. Actually the problem is that not every client is familiar with domains, hosting, etc. It requires some basic skills that need to be learned beforehand, which becomes a big obstacle for the clients. If you are looking to set up a small store, you may need to consider your running costs to find out your real margins. But if you are developing a huge store then all this would be worth the investments.

• Require Skilled Magento Developers:

Not every web or PHP developer can help you in managing a Magento ecommerce platform. Magento is based on the Zend framework and hence the developer must have specific knowledge of this framework. If the client is looking for any customizations, module additions, or any other changes then its in-house team would not be able to do. They need to find a dedicated Magento development company that is having a niche in working on Magento. Also, the development costs of Magento is a bit higher than their counterparts such as WooCommerce, or Shopify.

• Regular Updates, Maintenance, and Optimizations:

There are lots of in-built indexes, flat tables, caches, logs, etc for the proper functioning of the Magento. You need to update and maintain these regularly. Also, Magento releases its version updates regularly, so to make the most out of Magento you also need to update your store to the latest Magento version. This also requires a good proportion of money. The data migration tool helps, but migrating Magento 1 store data to a Magento 2 database requires a lot of effort. If you are upgrading from Magento 1 to Magento 2, or any other version update, prepare for a resource-heavy and potentially bumpy migration.

Wrapping Up

By the above-mentioned points, you must have understood that Magento is not financially optimal for small or new ecommerce stores. It would be better if they can move with other solutions such as WooCommerce, Shopify, or BigCommerce. However, at the end of the day if you are looking for a future-ready web store that is scalable, then Magento is your choice. Emizentech, will help you in choosing the best platform and delivering a fully-functional ecommerce store which would be best for you.