Why Magento Continues to Dominate?

Today’s customers expect nothing short of a complete website experience when they enter an ecommerce website. Ecommerce has diversified greatly in the last few years. It started as a sector that catered to the online buying and selling of particular niche products in the market. But over a period of time, as users began to see the inherent advantages of buying products without having to move out of their comfort zones (along with increased competition leading to lowering prices), the ecommerce scene began to explode.

 The Specifics Behind its Eminence

Even in this highly competitive environment, one platform continues to dominate the scene. Yes, that is Magento. As we mentioned in the beginning of the article, customers are looking at websites that satisfy all their expectations. That means delivery on security, user-centric design, ease of use, hybrid functionality and overall user experience. 

 

While other platforms perform exceedingly well on some of these parameters, Magento delivers on all these fronts and that is the reason for its continued success in the ecommerce scene.

Easier Customization

One of the principal advantages with Magento is that it provides for easier customization than its competitors. With a large number of extensions, you get to truly customize your ecommerce website according to your business requirements. 

 

It is the look and feel of your website that first attracts the user. And what decides this look and feel? It is your design. Now, add hassle-free theme design and integration in Magento’s list and you get to see why it remains attractive. 

 

Easier Payment Gateway and Social Media Integration

The best and most profitable way of promoting your website or attracting visitors to your website today, is to drive social media promotions. And Magento does this wonderfully through its integration with different social media platforms like Google+, facebook, twitter, linkedin etc.

And speaking of payment gateways, this is the most important part of your ecommerce website, one that decides whether customers are just going to visit your website or are they really going to make a purchase there. And, Magento makes the job much simpler with its payment customization standing out for its simplicity and ease of integration.

What we’ve mentioned here are just some of the advantages that go into making Magento the numero uno platform in ecommerce. For more on Magento and how it compares vis-a-vis the rest in its field, watch this space!

What You Should Know About ZenCart

When you start a discussion on what platform to choose to build an ecommerce site for your business, the discussion obviously veers to the ones that lead the numbers game or the platform that is chosen by the maximum number of people. But what goes rather unnoticed is that you need to choose the platform that suits your business and the objectives that you set out to achieve in the best manner. Not only should your ecommerce platform be easy-to-use and flexible along with being feature-rich, it also needs to be able to integrate all your modules to present a unified website.

So, which ecommerce website fits your bill? Before we get to that question, you need to know the essential features that your ecommerce platform should have. They are (in no specific order):

• Multilingual support
• Unlimited customization features
• Secure payment integration
• Ability to include as many categories as possible
• In-built CMS
• Made for mobile and responsive 
   

Along with all these your shopping cart must also be easy to install and use. (though there are many more features that you may require)

The one shopping cart that fulfils all of the above requirements is Zencart. The reason why we say Zen cart is primarily owing to its ease of use that enables even novices to quickly understand how to get around with it. Be it template or theme design, adding extensions, support features, payment gateway integration, nothing makes it look difficult to use. 

 

Customizing ZenCart

The key component in building any ecommerce is customization which means changing or modifying your front-end arrangement and database settings to reflect your business. If you are a small business, Zen cart has plenty of ready-to-use templates that cater to every need of yours. But if you need a template made for your business, it is best that you hire an experienced Zen cart developer who can do it for you.

Does this sound contradictory because we said Zen cart can be used by even newbies easily? Nope. This is because you need the right mix of novelty, simplicity and proportion in what you do and only developers can give you that. Updating the server and database options is one more area where you need to pay attention and this too, is best done with Zen cart developers.

How You Can Improve Page Speed in Magento 2

All of us are aware that Magento 2 is replete with lots of improvements in terms of features and interactivity apart from security updates as well. But questions on how its page speed can be improved have always remained. Now does speed automatically mean better performance? This leads us to a larger debate on performance and scalability, which are both related but different.

Performance and Scalability

Now, say you want to improve your server performance enabling it to handle some more load. But you may also choose to change the architecture in such as way that your performance is reduced but scalability increased. For instance, a shared or distributed redis cache could be less efficient when compared to running on a single server. But a shared server architecture improves your scalability though it cuts down on  performance. 

 

When it comes to ecommerce, people want sites to be speedy and responsive and so, what often matters the most is the speed at which the page is being rendered in the web browser. As far as Magento 2 is concerned, the Magento PHP server code takes up a third of the time and the remaining time is taken up for the Javascript, CSS files and all other web page components to download. Improving speed, therefore, involves not one but many factors.

Javascript Bundling

To manage Javascript file downloads, Magento uses RequireJS which results in an increased number of download requests. This in turn affects page performance.

The idea here is to bundle the JS files so that we have one request in place of ten. This also includes reducing/compressing the files by removing comments etc. Here you use the modularity features of RequireJS so as to reduce the effort.

This, you would find greatly reduces the page load time without you having to use the original raw files or reworking your code.

Inline Javascript 

 

Removing Inline Javascript can also greatly reduce the load time for the user, making the page appear before the user faster due to the DomContentLoaded event loading two times quicker. The downside though, is that you will need Javascript to fully render a page.

HTTP2 Protocol

This has many features like improved downloading of page assets and allowing the server to transfer files the browser needs before the browser asks for it. In fact, some developers opine that the improvements in HTTP2 will make the use of RequireJS redundant.

So, a combination of the above improvements will no doubt take your page loading speeds higher!