While startup companies often gravitate toward DIY eCommerce for small business options and try inexpensive online sales platforms, a solution like Magento can be a better, smarter choice for growing companies. Learn about how Magento can meet your eCommerce needs and discover its key benefits.
If you’re running a small business, you may not have the budget for large-scale promotional or public relations campaigns. Fortunately, a Magento site can help you stand out in more affordable ways, making this platform a good choice for eCommerce for small business.
With Magento, you can easily develop a responsive site that looks sharp on desktops, tablets, and mobile devices, ensuring that your customers can access your online store from anywhere. Since responsive design and mobile friendliness are key search engine optimization (SEO) ranking factors, this eCommerce platform can help you rank, drive traffic, and increase sales.
Your customers aren’t identical, so why funnel everyone through the same shopping experience on your website? Offering personalized shopping experiences can be a smart way to attract customers and boost your brand awareness. This is especially true for small businesses.
With Magento, creating custom experiences couldn’t be easier. You can personalize in-store offerings based on users’ genders and locations, and you can use existing customers’ shopping histories to give them customized offerings. With Magento’s customer segmentation options, you can even display dynamic promotions and pricing based on customer behaviors.
For small businesses, building trust isn’t always easy. Getting new customers to trust your company can be especially challenging if you don’t yet have a brand name with national recognition.
When building an eCommerce for small business site with Magento, stakeholders and customers alike can rest assured that their personal information and payment details are in good hands. Magento takes security seriously, placing each site in its own secure server environment and using read-only file system images for executable code. Magento Commerce even offers assistance with payment card industry (PCI) certification to boost the security and credibility of your small business.
You might have the most trustworthy site in your industry, but, if your checkout process is slow, clunky, or frustrating, you risk losing customers.
With a Magento site, you can easily speed up the checkout process, making first-time purchases easier for mobile customers and repeat purchases more likely from all customers. Magento’s Instant Purchase option even allows returning customers to check out in fewer steps, as long as they’ve opted to store payment details on your site.
Regardless of how small your company is when you first launch your online store, you’ll likely want to grow your business over time. Some platforms that provide eCommerce for small business are known for slowing down as your site generates more traffic and additional sales. Rather than slowing down as your business grows, Magento is designed to help you scale.
When Magento powers your online store, you can deploy sites around the world and do business globally. Since Magento proactively monitors your site’s server environment and scales up resources as necessary, you won’t have to worry about your site crashing, even if your eCommerce company goes viral.
When you run a small business, you’re constantly on the go, researching new products, networking with partners, and building your business. This means that any eCommerce solution you choose has to move with you.
As a cloud-based eCommerce platform, Magento is always available; to access it, all you need is an internet connection. This means that you can check inventory, review store performance, and analyze metrics from virtually anywhere.
Even if you’re starting out small, you will need an eCommerce solution that offers robust analytics and data tracking. After all, you’ll need to know what’s working and change what’s not as quickly as possible.
When you use Magento to run your eCommerce site, you might get more data capabilities than you bargained for. Magento allows you to easily integrate all of your data, including customer relationship management (CRM) tools, with your eCommerce data in a single spot. You can also use Magento’s best practice dashboards to help you analyze customer behavior to drive higher customer lifetime value and encourage repeat orders.
When considering your eCommerce for small business options, you may become overwhelmed, especially when you see the price tags. Building a great online store can be resource-intensive, especially when you consider the cost of hosting and maintaining the site yourself.
Magento may not be the least expensive option on the market, but the platform’s monthly subscription fee makes budgeting much easier, especially because it typically includes everything you need to keep your site up and running. If you want to add more functionality to your site, you can browse thousands of plugins in the Magento Marketplace to find an affordable fix.
One of the biggest perks of using Magento to power your site is that this eCommerce platform offers two levels of service. You’ll want to choose Magento Open Source if you’re in the market for a DIY option, and Magento Commerce if you want a full-featured version.
No matter which option you choose, however, you’ll need a team with ample Magento experience to help build your online store, optimize your eCommerce site for speed, and provide hosting options. With the right Magento team by your side, you can even give your online store a unique look and choose extensions that will take your eCommerce site to the next level.
Building your eCommerce business don’t have to drain your project budget or stress out your team. Connect with IronPlane to learn how our eCommerce for small business solutions can help you launch your online store, handle Magento hosting, and even provide support while saving you time and money.