Are you looking to open an eCommerce business, or would you like to overhaul an existing online store? If you research a little, you’ll realize that Magento is the most popular eCommerce development platform. At least 250,000 merchants across the world use Magento.
One reason for its popularity is its visual-based editor that allows retailers to customize their offerings by themselves. It offers a user-friendly content management tool that enables users with no programming knowledge to manipulate their shopping carts seamlessly.
There are many challenges unique to online stores, but you can avoid most of them if you base your business on Magento. Below are examples of eCommerce problems that Magento eliminates.
1. Poor Website Performance
One thing that can kill your online business is an eCommerce site with slow loading pages. Google reports that bounce rates rise 32 percent as page load times increase from one to three seconds.
If your site takes relatively long to load, customers will most likely click the back button and shift to a competitor’s site. You’ll lose business even if you have the best products or services in the market.
High bounce rates pose another problem – Google assumes that users don’t find the webpage helpful. Thus, its ranking on search result pages (SERPs) drops.
Magento can accelerate your website loading speed incredibly. Magento 2, in particular, utilizes Varnish Cache, one of the leading HTTP accelerating technologies. It supports full-page caching for your eCommerce store, which enables pages to load at lightning speed.
Additionally, a Magento-based website makes fewer HTTP requests than any other eCommerce platform. Customers enjoy a smooth experience due to fast response to queries. As a result, you achieve higher conversions and sales.
2. Multinational/Multi-language Infrastructure
With the expanding eCommerce landscape, it is becoming increasingly important as a merchant to be able to reach different audiences and customers from around the world in a variety of different languages. Unlike several other eCommerce platforms, Magento 2 solves this problem for merchants in an effective and efficient manner.
Magento’s infrastructure allows merchants to create multiple stores or different variations of a store which all live under the same roof. This allows merchants to create several different stores (or different variations of the same store) in order to cater to different customers around the world in various languages.
By creating different stores within the same Magento installation, merchants can cater to different countries around the world and translate existing content in order to easily and rapidly access worldwide markets. Furthermore, Magento’s multinational infrastructure allows merchants to share inventory, warehouses, and shipping options (among other things) across their entire product line, easily streamlining business operations and saving merchants lot of money in the long run.
3. Inability to Cross-Sell or Upsell
It’s pretty easy to persuade a customer who has just bought a product in a physical store to buy more. This is because there are physical goods, and you can address the client face to face.
On the other hand, many eCommerce merchants lose opportunities to increase their customers’ basket sizes because there’s no human-to-human contact.
Magento provides merchants with great cross-selling and upselling opportunities to enrich the shopping experience and boost order value. The cross-selling feature recommends products related to what a shopper has already added to their basket. Conversely, upselling suggests pricier alternatives to the item that a customer intends to buy.
The platform also allows you to update customers on stock availability and bargains like gifts, discounts, and coupons. You can add offers to the checkout pages to encourage more sales. Promotions can also reduce your cart abandonment rates.
Beyond upselling, cross-selling, and promotions, Magento has intuitive features for adding rich content to attract customers. Videos, for instance, can help you showcase a product’s attributes in a way that convinces prospective buyers.
4. Processing Large Scale Orders
Most online shoppers start with small orders to evaluate the platform’s reliability before placing larger ones. As an eCommerce merchant, you should ensure that your store can accommodate any orders regardless of the volume. It provides customers the confidence they need to do more significant transactions with your business.
A Magento-based store can handle all your eCommerce requirements, including processing thousands of orders concurrently. It can accommodate 5,000 shoppers and five administrators simultaneously, proving its suitability in high-traffic eCommerce use cases.
When it comes to inventory management for massive stores, Magento can handle over 500,000 products effectively. The platform is also highly scalable.
If you have informative webpages and comprehensive product descriptions, Magento will show product details in a layered navigation style. Advanced search and attribute-filtering heighten the search functionality on your eCommerce site.
5. Pricing for Different Customers
Large businesses with countless customers often have varied pricing for different customer categories. The principal metric for setting diverse prices is order volumes placed over a specified period. How can an eCommerce merchant regulate prices for various customer segments?
You can do it in several ways on your Magento-based online store. The platform allows you to offer volume discounts based on order levels.
Alternatively, you can categorize customers into groups depending on the desired attributes and assign a given percentage of discount to each cluster. This approach ensures that customers who buy higher volumes get more value.
6. Poor Mobile User Engagement
Traditional web design focused on desktops. With the advent of internet-enabled mobile devices, problems in accessing such sites developed due to mismatched screen sizes and resolutions. Developers had to switch to responsive website design.
A responsive website adapts its layout to match the device in use regardless of its size. It renders readable text and clear images without the need to zoom or scroll.
Studies show that 68.1 percent of all website traffic in 2020 originated from mobile devices. Furthermore, about 51 percent of internet users use their smartphones to order products online. That means you are losing many business opportunities to competitors if your eCommerce website is not responsive.
Magento is a responsive eCommerce platform, which makes it mobile-friendly from the landing page to checkout. With responsive design reference themes, merchants can have websites viewable on devices with different screen resolutions.
The latest Magento versions feature a touch-screen friendly admin panel to help you navigate your store’s catalog easily. Users get a superior customer experience which fosters engagement and drives sales.
7. Webpage and Content Updating
Websites need to provide content that is valuable and relevant to customers to maintain engagement. If you run an online store, you need a user-friendly content management solution to update fresh content regularly.
Magento has a built-in content management feature that enables you to edit your store’s webpages even without any technical skills. Its intuitive editor allows you to manipulate the functioning of your shopping cart.
8. Cybersecurity Threats
ECommerce retailers rely on the internet entirely for revenue, making them highly vulnerable to cyberattacks. Their risk of cybercrime is incredibly high because online stores are freely accessible to the public, including hackers.
Cybercriminals know how sensitive online business is to interruptions. A distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) event can be catastrophic, making such attacks lucrative opportunities for extortion. Since eCommerce retailers process payments online, thieves constantly attempt to steal customer data to commit credit card fraud.
Magento offers multiple levels of customizable security components to avert cyberattacks. Among its standard security features include PCI data security, a secondary password prompt, and Google reCAPTCHA on login forms.
Features like two-factor authentication, which is easy to configure, can add an extra protection layer to your Magento-based store. Devise a custom path to your admin console to thwart intrusion attempts and secure all your webpages with Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). SSL is an encryption-based internet protocol for maintaining secure internet connections and protecting sensitive data.
Magento constantly monitors the platform’s security and releases periodical security patches to seal any discovered loopholes. The company offers software tools and documentation to support online retailers in keeping their stores safe.
9. Slow Product Search
People who visit eCommerce sites are mostly potential buyers who know what they want. They expect to search and find items immediately they land on your online store. For this reason, it’s in your best interest to have a website that generates relevant results rapidly.
You can boost the user experience for your store visitors using Magento’s intelligent search features. The platform enables users to filter products by multiple parameters, including recently viewed products, product tags, and product reviews. As a retailer, you can customize various search terms with auto-suggested keywords or phrases.
10. eCommerce Logistical Challenges
Freight shipping can be convoluted for large eCommerce owners like B2B sellers due to the volumes they transport. You must understand the complex regulations you might have to follow and the associated costs to give customers realistic estimates.
The Magento platform integrates with many third-party freight shipping management tools to help streamline and automate the process. You can optimize logistics costs and track delivery from your online store to enhance operational efficiency.
11. Learning Consumer Behavior
Businesses can only fill market gaps if they understand consumer needs and what influences buying decisions. With that information, you can offer high-demand products to your customers and enjoy increased sales and profits in the process.
Magento helps you gather valuable data about your store and analyze it to draw insights and understand your customers. The platform utilizes several world-class reporting features that can generate about 20 different reports.
You get intelligence on customer buying habits. These insights can enable you to target prospective buyers with appropriate marketing messaging at the best time.
Even better, Magento keeps on updating your store’s reports constantly to present the latest data in real-time. You get enriched information on the number of registered accounts, order quantities, average order values, best-selling products, shipping fees, taxes, and more.
12. Too Many SKUs and Data
Stock keeping units (SKUs) are vital in eCommerce as they facilitate accurate inventory tracking. You can quickly tell the remaining quantities of a given product and reconcile stock levels.
Besides SKUs, you need to monitor other product attributes that customers consider before purchasing an item, like size and color. Magento can manage thousands of SKUs and product-related data and generate it instantaneously on demand.
Get Professional Help for Your Magento Site
MageMontreal is an official Magento service partner specializing in Magento programming, website design, debugging, training, audit, and support.
Contact us if you would like our help in optimizing your Magento eCommerce site.
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