Ecommerce site development with Magento

IntelliGrape recently started its new vertical of e-commerce sites development using Magento. Our ethos has been on choosing a leading technology/platform for whatever we do – be it custom web development or mobile apps development or ecommerce site development using packaged solution. Also, emphasis is not only on choosing a great technology but also be a thought leader in the same. We had in-numerous meetings discussing and evaluating various platforms for e-commerce site development. Finally, after reviewing many other platforms, we zeroed-in on Magento.

In around 4 years, Magento has garnered around 20 – 25% of market share (depending on what source one refers), which also means that Magento has become a market leader in the whole space. After eBay acquired Magento in mid 2011, and its integration with X.commerce, adoption and growth of Magento has actively been growing.

A quick peek into Google trends throws light on the popularity and growth of Magento.

In the annual analysis from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011 done by TechEgo, its bots crawled top 1 million Alexa sites and identified which platform is used by online shops falling in top 1 million sites. Results of this research suggests that Magento is by far leading its biggest competitor – Zencart.

Market Share of Magento

Magento is built on Zend Framework, true MVC architecture and is scalable and super flexible. Magento is very well engineered. Magento has an extensive features list and there are quite a few features that come as standard in Magento but are required to be added in other carts. Magento literally covers every feature under the sun and there is nothing that cannot be done with it.

There is an extension for anything and everything. If one finds anything amiss in standard features, one will certainly find an extension for it which is usually pretty affordable. Magento community has also grown very big over a period of time.

Magento offers multiple stores and store views, and is way more customizable. Magento provides auto generated Google sitemap, meta for products and category pages and is in general, very SEO friendly.

There are few disadvantages of Magento as well such as Magento is too complex and heavy and requires dedicated servers; it also has a steep learning curve but pros outweigh cons to a great extent.

Thanks!

Raman Mittal
raman[at]intelligrape.com