A Brief Look at Magento, X-Cart and OsCommerce

There are a plethora of ecommerce platforms that colour the ecommerce market today. But, which one you choose could well determine the prospects of your business five or ten years from now. Whatever may be the differences of opinion on other issues, there can be no disagreement that Magento, Oscommerce and X-cart are the 3 leading ecommerce platforms of the day. This article looks at their features and advantages briefly.

Magento

 Magento is the undisputed leader of the shopping cart market in the world today. It is an Open Source shopping cart that provides you, the user with enormous flexibility and control over the look and feel, content and functionality of the store. The other major advantage of Magento is that it is extremely feature-rich. Some of its top features are:

1. It provides you with targeted promotion and merchandising

2. You get product suggestion tools, with ratings and reviews

3. It provides you with useful customer segmentation

4. Search engine optimization

5. Multiple payment and shipping options among others

X-Cart

Second to none, this is an ecommerce platform based on PHP smarty templates. Feature-rich, secure and flexible, it actually combines all the characteristics that you look for in an ecommerce platform pretty neatly. If you’re looking to build a multi-functionality ecommerce website with lot of products on offer and huge user traffic, you should seriously consider X-Cart. Let’s look at its top features:

1. Highly customizable, flexible and scalable ecommerce platform

2. Multiple product and multiple language support with maximum flexibility

3. Complete integration with all major payment gateways

4. Fully search engine friendly which improves your visibility greatly.

OsCommerce

If you need a platform that offers you multiple functionalities but still can be setup quickly with considerable ease, then you must go for Oscommerce. Your web server needs to support PHP and MySQL to run Oscommerce. Some of its features that stand out are:

1. Broadened customization with an OS that is easy to administer

2. One of the best ecommerce platforms with extensible multilingual functionality

3. Minimal risk of corruption of files as all content is stored as reference files in text format

4. Made for mobile, with product comparison features and multiple currency support embedded

5 Exciting Extensions in Magento

There are plenty of ecommerce platforms available in the market today that give you security, ease of use and responsiveness. The why does one platform seem to tower over the rest? The reason why Magento is the platform of choice for so many budding entrepreneurs and big businesses alike, is that it is easily customizable and extendable to suit your business objectives. 

 

This article looks at some of the extensions in Magento that greatly enhance your website’s functionality and usability.

Smart Menu

Every customer who visits an ecommerce website wants a simple and quick way to filter products. Magento enables this in its normal functionality itself through its default filter and categories menu. The smart menu extension simply extends that by integrating the category buttons in the sidebar of your page. With a collapse or expand feature and drop down support, it’s got all you asked for. 

 

Product Image View

Impressing your visitor or knocking him off often starts with simple things. Say your visitors want to zoom the image of a product they want to view. In many websites you can do this but when you’ve clicked it you realise that you have come out of the list or catalog list in your e-store. This extension allows you to directly view the magnified image of the product without having to leave your current page or catalog.

Enhanced Product Review

No customer today buys a product without going through its reviews and analysing threadbare its advantages and shortcomings. This is why you find certified buyer reviews becoming more and more popular across ecommerce sites. To this end, Magento has the Enhanced product review extension to help the customer read all reviews of the product they’re searching for, in a single page. Magento does this using its pagination support feature.

Easy Banner

Getting outstanding banners for your website is no more an issue thanks to the Easy banner extension of Magento. Slide any banner on your home page and attract visitors with exciting features for banners and content management. With a variety of gallery modes to choose from, Easy banner makes Banners and templates truly easy!

Gallery Pro

Ever wanted to create your own albums replete with categories and comments? Well, this extension allows you to do precisely that. It lets you create your own albums and sub-albums and organise them based on the topic or any criteria that you choose. You also have many options to view the photo in that particular category. Time-saving and easy to use, this extension has truly caught on amongst the users!

How Magento Helps Your Business Expand And Adapt

Why does Magento continue to be No.1? Well, the answer is not difficult to answer for those who have studied its features and modules keenly. Magento took the pride of place among ecommerce platforms of the day principally due its performance on the security and customizability front. Add the advantage of being Open Source to all this and what you get is a comprehensive package that any business owner will find hard to refuse.

But in this article we take a look at the adaptability and mobile-easiness of Magento and how it helps businesses now more than ever before.

Power and Scalability- A Potent Combination

Now, with all of its elements that define Magento’s functionality, Magento does not compromise on versatility. The fact that it you can adjust it to suit your business and it will adapt the way you want have been of great liking to its customers. This is because ‘managing the website’, which used to take a lot of time earlier, was now reduced to a no-job.

The other scalability feature of Magento is its ability to make creation of multi-stores a very simple task. All organizations today require multiple sites a want their websites to remain flexible and dynamic. Magento has all its instruments and modules in the right place for you so much so that you wouldn’t even have the necessity of customizing it for your needs. If expansion is the watch word, Magento is your platform.

Mobile Adaptability

It is no more two websites. No more two URLs. No more of single layouts. With mobiles becoming the default mode of search, browsing and shopping, your business needs to be tailored for the mobile. And no one does this better than Magento. Modules, pictures, thumbnails, content, multimedia plugins, everything that you need to create a responsive website is tailored for the mobile. In other words, the Magento experience is essentially the mobile experience.

With the maximum extensions for any ecommerce platform, you have the room to be creative and different. From security to SEO to streaming video to social media, you have extensions that augment your capabilities in every way. All you need to do is find the right ecommerce development partner!

How Magento Enterprise Helps You Build Your Brand

Though there are many platforms that offer basic ecommerce solutions, Magento is among the few platforms that offer enterprise class ecommerce solutions. It combines a creative shopping cart with rich features that offer your brand’s customers a great user experience. This ability to build a brand for their customers centred on is actually at the core of Magento’s strategy.

What your website offers in terms of user experience is what defines your company’s brand for the visitors. They identify their experiences of your website with your company itself. This way, a great website helps create a set of adjectives for your company in the mind of the consumer. This process, of occupying the customer’s mindspace, is critical to building your company’s brand in the long run.

So how exactly does Magento help you build your brand on your online store-fronts? Basically, what does your ecommerce website need to build a better brand for your company? Here are they:

• Marketing your product and packaging it
  
  
• Selling channels, be it stores or website or catalog
  
  
• Building better customer experience through a wide range of extensions that cater to all customer needs.
  
  

With Magento enterprise edition, you get features that satisfy your needs in all the 3 areas like:

1. Magento does a fine job balancing the text, imagery and space on your screen by giving all of them equal preference. It also represents the functional elements in a way other ecommerce platforms have not been able to do.

2. Magento structures content and separates product categories in a unique way giving users the look and feel of a trusted brand that is sure of itself.

3. Finally, you get a whole lot of extensions that help you widen the functionality of your website and improve its usability and security.

Have you got the Magento enterprise advantage? Get in touch with developers who have the competence to build your company’s next-gen ecommerce website.

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!