Table of Content
What is Magento Development? Features, Benefits & How It Works
Any e-commerce start-up must carefully choose the platform for building their website. The platform should provide flexibility in design, website architecture, product catalogue management, payment gateways, and search engine optimization.
All of this should come at an affordable cost. After all, you never know how expensive a platform might become when your website starts handling millions of visitors and managing tens of thousands of products.
With these considerations in mind, the Magento E-commerce Platform stands out as the most advanced and cost-effective solution, seamlessly managing the complexities of an e-commerce website.
This Magento e-commerce development guide explores the steps of setting up a store, functionality overview, features and benefits.
What is the Magento Development Platform for E-commerce?
Magento is an open-source e-commerce website development platform that offers business owners high-level flexibility in terms of product catalogue management, content, UX design, payment gateways, SEO, and scalability.
It is commonly called Adobe Commerce, a product of Adobe.
Its cost-effectiveness and scalability make it suitable for businesses of all sizes.
Its open-source nature helps to scale a store from a few products to thousands without a need to change anything drastically. You can easily achieve it using a few plugins.
Let’s begin by understanding what you need to start.
What Do You Need to Know Before You Start with Magento Development?
Before you begin with the Magento development process, you need to get the following things right on your plate.
Stack Requirements
| Component | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Operating System | – Linux-based OS (e.g., RedHat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian). – MacOS (only for local development, not for production). |
| Web Server | – Apache 2.4 or later. – Nginx 1.16+ or later. |
| Memory | – Minimum: 2GB RAM (not recommended for production). – Recommended: 4GB or more for smooth operations. |
| Database | – MySQL 8.0+ (required for Magento 2.4.x). – MariaDB 10.4+ or 10.5+ (alternative to MySQL). |
| PHP | – Minimum: PHP 8.0 (required for Magento 2.4.x). – Recommended: PHP 8.1 or higher. – Supported extensions: bcmath, ctype, curl, dom, gd, intl, mbstring, opcache, pdo_mysql, simplexml, soap, xsl, zip. |
| Security | – Valid SSL certificate required (self-signed certificates not supported). – TLS required for secure integrations like PayPal and repo.magento.com. |
| Mail Server | – Requires an SMTP server or Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) for email functionality. |
| Composer | – Composer 2.x required for managing dependencies. |
| Search Engine | – ElasticSearch 7.x or OpenSearch required (default catalog search engine for Magento 2.4.x). |
| Caching | – Redis is recommended for session and cache storage. |
| Full-Page Cache | – Varnish supported for full-page caching. |
Website Domain & Hosting Platform
Select a domain name that aligns with your store idea and target customers.
While choosing a hosting platform, check if it is compatible with Magento. There are hosting providers with plans specific to Magento. There are also cloud hosting, shared hosting, and enterprise hosting providers.
Listed below are different hosting providers, however, there are many options available that you can explore
| Type | Hosting Provider | Reason for Selection |
|---|---|---|
| Cloud Hosting | AWS (Amazon Web Services) | Highly scalable, customizable stack, and robust support for Magento-specific requirements like ElasticSearch and Varnish. |
| Managed Hosting | Nexcess | Specifically optimized for Magento, offers auto-scaling, built-in caching, and PCI compliance. |
| Shared Hosting | SiteGround | Entry-level Magento hosting with excellent customer support, free SSL, and CDN, suitable for small stores. |
| Enterprise Hosting | Rackspace | Enterprise-grade performance with high availability, advanced security, and 24/7 Magento support. |
Download & Install Magento
To download and install Magento, you will have to create an account on Adobe Experience Cloud.
You can refer to the installation guide here for detailed instructions.
Setting up Your E-commerce Store
After the installation is complete, configure basic settings such as country, time zone, website restrictions, currency, etc. You can also save your store information, such as name, contact number, and address.
Design Your Website
The default Luma or Blank theme is sufficient to start with. It has enough options for banners, color schemes, buttons, and logos to give your brand a starting point. But if you want something precise, and are ready to invest a few extra bucks, you can choose from the gallery of themes on Magento marketplace.
Some themes within the platform may be expensive but not all. Also, there are a lot of communities where Magento enthusiasts give away themes for free. You can explore there as well.
Also, you can try to find the right one on websites like ThemeForest, Template Monster, and Envato.
You can also take a designer’s help to create your design from scratch.
Onboard the Extensions You Need
There are Magento extensions and plugins available for every aspect of managing your e-commerce website. There are extensions for SEO optimization, sales and marketing, payment and security, administration and store management, website performance, and customer support. Each has its features, support, and pricing. Explore and choose the best one for your needs.
Import Products
Now is the time to fill your store with the products you are selling. You can do this through the Magento Import Products module. This module lets you upload product information in bulk using a CSV file.
You can download a sample CSV file to understand the layout required.
To start with, select the “Entity Type” as “Product”.
Upload the CSV file (modified according to the sample) and click check data to see if there are any errors.
If there are no errors, an Import button will be shown. Click on it.
After the import is complete, go for setting up payment and shipping options.
Configure Payment & Shipping Settings
Magento offers 7 different shipping methods to integrate with. They are Flat rate, free shipping, table rates, UPS, USPS, FedEx, & DHL. Configuring any of them is easy using a number of guides available online.
For payments as well, things are pretty simple. Magento ecommerce platform supports check/money order, bank transfer, and zero subtotal checkout. The store can be integrated with PayPal, Stripe, Braintree, and all other popular payment gateways by using relevant extensions from the marketplace.
After you follow all these steps, your Magento e-commerce website is ready. You can review every aspect of it and share it with your team to check for bugs if any.
In case you come across any issues, you can correct them by going through any of the steps mentioned above.
If the problem seems too technical, you can get in touch with an expert for Magento development, known as Magento developer, through their customer support, and they will solve your problem.
Why Should You Use Magento for Your E-commerce Store?
First, let’s look at the stats:
- More than 130000 websites across the world are built on Magento
- Magento has a significant market share in the USA, Germany, and Europe, which are major e-commerce markets.
- The “harborfright.com”, result of Magento development, has a traction of 31 million monthly visits.
- There are 3500+ Magento extensions
Looking for more reasons? Here are the benefits and features of Magento Ecommerce Platform
Flexible Architecture
When growing an e-commerce store, the need to add more products, categories, and subcategories can arise at any time. Modular architecture in Magento development simplifies this process, allowing businesses to adapt and experiment without requiring a rigid product categorization plan from the start. The store can evolve seamlessly to meet changing demographics and market demands.
This flexibility also supports rapid scalability. Additionally, Magento’s advanced search feature ensures that even large product catalogues remain user-friendly, making it easy for customers to find the right product.
Better SEO Management
Features like full-page caching, database indexing, and CDN integration enhance a website’s core web vitals, a critical factor for SEO. Its content management system is customizable for blogs, landing pages, product descriptions, and category pages. You can easily create layouts for any type of page using drag-and-drop functionality.
To simplify content creation and optimization, the Magento marketplace offers a variety of extensions and plugins designed to help you craft better SEO-friendly content.
Mobile Friendliness
More than 70% of sales on e-commerce websites come from mobile phones. This clearly indicates that the better user experiences your website provides to mobile users, the higher your sales potential will be.
Magento’s design features automatically adapt to various screen sizes, ensuring a responsive website. The default themes and those available in the marketplace are mobile-friendly and highly touch-responsive. Additionally, the platform offers mobile-friendly features such as a hamburger menu, sticky navigation, tappable buttons, and product image swiping.
Moreover, Magento provides tools to help you create your own mobile app, further enhancing your mobile commerce capabilities.
50+ Payment Gateways
Providing your customers with multiple payment options not only enhances their purchase experience but also helps reduce cart abandonment rates. In addition to popular payment gateways like Braintree, PayPal, and Authorize.net, Magento also supports regional payment gateways. Integrating regional gateways ensures compliance and facilitates seamless transactions in local currencies.
Large Magento Community
If you encounter any bugs or need more information about plugins and extensions, you can rely on the vast Magento development community for support. Currently, over 140,000 sites run on Magento. You can connect with developers on LinkedIn, Reddit, and official Magento forums. This is where Magento’s open-source nature truly shines.
Developers can access, modify, and share its code to ensure that users benefit from a constant flow of updates, and customizations.
That’s not all!
Magento keeps your site secure, gives your users a better search experience, and easier to integrate with Google.
To Summarize
Magento is the go-to platform for building an e-commerce store that is flexible, scalable, mobile-friendly, and easy to manage. The only drawback is its reliance on complex coding skills, which isn’t necessarily a downside given its extensive benefits. With the right professional for Magento development, the entire process becomes seamless. You can even consider migrating your existing platform to Magento for enhanced performance and features.
FAQs
1. What is Magento Used For?
Magento is an open-source website development platform specifically designed for e-commerce. It is also called as Adobe Commerce.
2. What Programming Language Does Magento Use?
Magento uses PH programming language, which is popularly used for e-commerce website development.
3. What Are the Hosting Requirements for Magento?
To run Magento effectively, your hosting plan should include a minimum of 2GB of RAM, a compatible PHP version (ideally 7.4 or higher), a MySQL 5.7 or MariaDB 10.4 database or higher, and either Apache 2.4 or Nginx web server; a Linux operating system is generally recommended for optimal performance.
