Magento is an open source e-commerce cms. An e-commerce cms like Magento allows a business to Setting up a web selling products to online customers, while providing an admin panel interface where the business can manage their products, customers, orders among other things.
Magento was first released in 2007 and since then it’s grown to become the most popular e-commerce cms today (35% market share in May 2016) and is now powering over 100,000 online e-commerce websites.
Magento has a free Community Edition, and a pay-per-year Enterprise Edition (EE), and in this post we will only discuss the Community Edition(CE) and where it stands out from other e-commerce cms.
Hosted vs self-hosted
Some e-commerce cms are hosted, that is, they are tied to the hosting of the company. Setting up an e-commerce webite with them is alike to renting a service; your e-commerce website is tied to their system.
Magento, on the other side, is self-hosted, which means have your own code of the site. The downside is that it is depend to you (or your web developer) to search a hosting provider to set up the cms on. The benefit though is that you completely own the site, can do any changes you wish, and can transfer it to any hosting registrar.
Internationalization
Internationalization of your e-commerce store can attract new customers, and Magento can help with this because we can use an multiple languages and multiple currencies on the website.
Mageworx magento store provides you with all these features and a skilled coder can build wonders with this platform in order to build attractive and unique looking magento e-commerce stores. The cost of Mageworx magento store varies according to your requirements.
Theming & Multiple Stores
Magento allows the owner to change the theme (look) of the site without changing any functionality. A powerful advantage of Magento is that it can run several websites outwards while sharing the same products and customers among the web portals, all managed from the same admin panel.
Open Source
Magento itself is an open source cms platform, built upon open source frameworks and programming codes. Source codes are open to the public; thus it is transparent. It is highly scalable.
Third party extensions
Extensions allow the web developer or business owner to add more specific feature to the store or website that is not a standard part of the cms, without having to develop that function themselves, often saving money and time.
Magento extensions can be used for adding features such as product offers, social media integrations, quick payment and lots more. You can choose which extension will suitable to your store and then download the most relevant one. These extensions are either paid or free.
Costs
On the other hand, Magento is free-open source software. The community edition of Magento is free of cost. And, you will only have to pay for hosting your store online. The premium edition of the software, the Magento Enterprise Edition, costs $18,000 per year. If you are not well-versed with PHP, you will have to hire a Magento developer.
Customization
Magento is known for its scalability, flexibility and features. Being an open source, one could make as many changes as one wants through Magento Customization and Development. Therefore, this source and the services of customization of the templates available on this source become relevant to one’s business, especially the start ups which are not very sure about their deliverables initially.