What is a store builder?
Content management systems are a powerful control panel that can run your site professionally for your purpose. Store builders do exactly this. Of course, with the difference that this system is designed to meet the requirements of a store site.
It means that you can define your products through it, insert product descriptions and change the status of stock and pricing. Recently, another store builder named Magento has emerged and has been well received.
What is Magento?
If we want to answer the question, what is Magento and what exactly does it do? To answer, we must say that Magento is an e-commerce platform or store content management system and is considered one of the best and most famous store builders in the world. The Magento language is written in PHP and allows the programmer to launch the most well-equipped and perfect sites in the shortest possible time. Magento’s flexibility allows site owners to transform a store with a small number of products and simple needs into a store with a large number of products and large orders without changing the platforms. This store builder has two paid versions (Enterprise) and free (Community) and as the name suggests, users have to pay fees to use the paid version. Undoubtedly, the paid version has more features for users. The first version of Magento was released as a beta by Roy Rubin and Yves Kutner in August 2007. It also released the Enterprise version in April 2009. It was in 2010 that the Magento store builder mobile application was launched and eBay bought all Magento shares.In November 2015, Magento 2 was launched, and at the same time, Permira took ownership of Magento. It was at the end of 2018 that Adobe became the owner of the Magento store builder, and in the same year they released the Magento 2.3 version.
High security is a prominent feature of Magento
One of the issues in using Magento is its security. There has always been a debate on the security of this system, but in general, this store builder can be considered a safe site in terms of security. In addition, providers are also serious about establishing more security on their platform, and security patches are released for all Magento versions almost monthly. The Magento platform allows you to test your site using various security tools and fix it if there is a problem. For example, if your site or blog is an information site, if there is a security problem for your site, the situation may be corrected and the problem solved by restoring the backup and fixing the desired bug. But if your site is a store site, by doing this many orders will be deleted or even worse it will interfere with the creation of unpaid orders and other things. Magento store builder helps you maintain the security of your site and prevent this from happening.
What sites use Magento?
In general, if we want to examine a content production system, the most valid and effective criterion will be to examine the credibility of these systems in the eyes of users and the percentage of their use of this system. Undoubtedly, the percentage of using large systems such as WordPress and Joomla will be very high.
But if we want to express the percentage of use of the Magento system, we must say that Magento accounts for only one percent. In other words, according to the statistics provided by a reliable source such as W3techs, one percent of all sites that were launched using CMSs use the Magento content management system.
Available versions of Magento
Until today, several versions of Magento have been presented, which we will examine and explain each one below.
Magento Open Source
If you have noticed, most Magento users use its free and open source version. This version has many features and excellent settings. So if you want to know all these possibilities and control and adjust them, a developer can be a good help for you.This version provides you with features such as product categories, user groups, discount coupons, as well as exciting add-ons such as “multi-store”, “related products”, “pre-sale” and “side sales”.
Magento Commerce Cloud
Another version that provides users with many features is the Magento Premium version. This version is more efficient and faster and allows you to have full-time access to support specialists. Also, this version provides you with many plugins and tools and makes it easier for you to control the site.
If your site is just starting or considered medium, I suggest not to use this version of Magento; Because this version is very expensive. Even using it for foreign sites requires a lot of money.
Installing Magento and training how to set up a store using it
First, enter the Magento website and take a look at its environment. At first, the busyness of your website may confuse you, but don’t worry. Because many options are designed for developers. To register in Magento, find and click on the Free Trial Magento store link, so that the registration form will be displayed for you.
1- Manage the admin page
After you complete the registration form, an email containing a special link will be sent to you as confirmation of registration. This link will direct you to the admin page of the store.
2- Choice of hosting
If your store has many products and your site may have high traffic, then you need powerful servers.
3- Choose a theme for your store
Choosing the perfect theme and color for the store is one of the marketing strategies that has a great impact on attracting users. That’s why many online stores ask their developers to choose a suitable theme and color for the store based on the store’s brand and their thoughts.
4- Store Design
Following the initial steps you took to set up your site, you now need to customize Magento for your brand. To do this, hold the mouse on the design option in the quick start menu. Then, from the sub-menu that appears, choose the option of selecting and customizing the design (Select & Customize Your Design).
After that, a small window will appear on the screen that will explain how Magento themes work. You need to click on the continue option to be redirected to the theme editor section. There you can design and personalize your storefront in any style you like.
5- Create a database
After the steps mentioned above, now it’s time to set up the database or control center. You can see these settings on the admin page and you can add items such as: store name, email address to receive notifications, email address for admins and customers, shipping and delivery methods, payment method, etc.
6- Add products
Now is the time to fill your store shelves with a variety of products. Select Create New Products from the Products menu. Then Magento will ask you to enter the attributes of the desired product, which is the Attribute set.
7- Enter product descriptions
One of the most important settings you have to make on store sites is writing descriptions for each product. The quality and attractiveness of the descriptions and images that you use for each product has a direct impact on attracting the customer and makes him buy the product. The information to be written should include items such as: creative name for the products, size, type and material, exchange or return conditions and other important details. To be successful, you must be familiar with the principles and tools of content creation and white hat SEO.
8- Add images and prices
If you want to enter the price of each product, select Prices from the left menu. Then enter details about taxes and other items. To add product images, click on Images in the left menu. Here you choose the main image, thumbnail, and index image. After changing the price and images, be sure to select “Save and continue editing”. The article about image SEO is useful for you.
9- Enter keywords
In the left menu, there is the Meta Information section, which is used to optimize search engine results. In this section, you must enter the title and description that you want to be displayed in the search engine. After that, add keywords with the purpose of SEO. This stage of configuration is very important; Because it will play a strong and effective role in increasing website traffic.
10- Create groups for subscribers
As the title suggests, at this stage you can categorize the people on your site. In this way, first select the Customer Groups option and then create a new group with the help of New Group. It is up to you to consider the number of people in these groups as one or thousands. Sometimes you may want to show a discount on prices, different promotions, or attractive offers only to a certain group of your customers, Magento provides you with the possibility to do this easily.
11- Set up payment and shipping method
In online business, the most important thing is how to pay and send goods. If these options are not present on your site, it is as if no site has been created. If you want to set these items for your site, click on the “Start My Store” option located at the top left. Doing this in Magento is as easy as other online sales platforms.
12- The final launch of the site
Finally, when you have given all the settings and designed your site well, to open and connect the store to the Internet, click on the “Get Going” menu and select the “Launch Your Store” option. Congratulations, your store is up and running using Magento.
Advantages of Magento
In the previous sections, we talked about the types of Magento versions and how much they are used. Undoubtedly, having good features and benefits has caused many sites to use this content system. In the following, we will discuss some of these features.
1- Easy and good SEO
In an online store, good and proper SEO is one of the most important tasks that webmasters must take care of. One of the problems that many store content management systems face is an acceptable SEO and optimization for search engines. In general, the Magento system is at a high level and has a good display capability on desktop, tablet and mobile systems, which can have a great impact on SEO.
2- One management panel for multiple stores
Another advantage of Magento is that it gives you a centralized management from a personalized panel that you can use to manage all the sites you have or own. In other words, you can see the status of all sites, orders and their products by logging in once.
3- High possibility of control
In addition to the things mentioned, with Magento you can have high control over various things. For example, it will be very easy to add a number of features in the store using Magento. But in other systems, adding these items requires a number of plugins, which may be troublesome.
4- Coordination with payment gateways
One of the things that is very important in setting up a store site is coordinating the site with payment gateways. You can have your own store portal using Magento features. Now the choice is yours to use the direct communication provided by the banks or to use indirect portals. Of course, do not neglect the importance of receiving this information for the store site.
5- Native to the store
Magento is an online store specialist, using which you no longer need other platforms. Magento works professionally in this field and knows what challenges a store needs. When you use this system, you will actually have several years of experience of this platform in providing a store.
6- Being open source
Magento allows you to customize your platform and that is why developers choose Magento. Also, because Magento is open source, it can be fed from various sources and provide ideal platforms for its expansion. In addition, since this content management system is open source, it has been able to achieve many things and allow you to modify it according to your needs and desires.
7- Support and references
Another advantage of Magento is its good support and reference. Also, Magento has active communities and documents have been provided by Adobe.
Disadvantages of Magento
1- Long and time-consuming editing
In addition to being difficult, editing data in Magento requires a lot of time and is done very slowly. So, if you can edit 40 articles in WordPress at a given time, you can only edit 20 articles in Magento at that time. The procedure is the same and there is nothing you can do.
2- Difficult to use
If we want to mention the biggest problem that users have with Magento, we have to say that it is difficult to use. Magento allows its users to do anything, but it has its own rules, and it will not be easy for those who are not familiar with site management.
3- High number of errors
If you start your site with Magento, you will not have a smooth site and you will face many errors. Of course, there are many good supports and documents written in English that you can use to solve your problem.
4- The cost of support
Undoubtedly, one of the main pillars of any store site is its expansion. In fact, many sites do anything with the aim of business development. But if you have used Magento and want to make a general edit, Magento no longer provides these facilities for free and Magento development becomes expensive.
5- Severe changes in versions
So far, three versions of Magento, namely Magento 1 and Magento 2, and the third version related to Adobe, which is the premium version and for sale, have been presented. Normally, versions 1 and 2 are used more, but the problem is that these two versions are not similar at all, and many of the changes in these versions are confusing. The results of these two versions are also different and you may get confused when using them.
What are the best hosts for Magento?
In the previous episodes, you got to know the Magento store builder in detail. But maybe you have a question, which host is more suitable for Magento? In this regard, we should mention that Magento is a store system and is written in PHP language. Therefore, Linux operating system is more suitable for it. Most people who use Magento use Linux hosts, cloud hosts. But due to the fact that this content management system is a store and may have many requests to the database in case of high traffic, a virtual server or dedicated server will also be suitable for it.
last word
As mentioned above, one of the most popular store builders in the world is Magento, which you can use to set up and manage your online store. Although its open source version is free, it provides a lot of features to site owners. But if these features are not enough for your site, you can use the paid version and its unique features.
For read more in this category click here
Find out more in wikipedia
