Considering a Magento 2.0 Upgrade? Here’s Why it’s a Smart Choice

For those of you who are new to CMS on e-commerce platforms, Magento is the leading digital commerce platform who launched an upgrade – Magento 2 in late 2015. This new version like its predecessor is open source for enterprise and community editions. The upgrade guarantees enhanced performance and scalability while enabling brands, retailers, and businesses across B2C and B2B industries to create engaging digital shopping experiences in a well paced and cost-effective manner. It also promises new features to boost conversion rates along with business agility and productivity improvements. The new platform stays true to the traditional open source culture at Magento and offers unmatched flexibility and innovation opportunities to all the global ecosystem of partners and developers. The upgraded Magento 2 also has a new Admin panel design that offers streamlined, consumer-like interface which helps save time from managing routine tasks while being extremely user friendly. This version also happens to be touch device friendly, facilitating the freedom to make updates or track sales while on-the- go.

Magento 2 Market share
(Rankings & overall market share, growth rates of top 10 e-commerce platforms, research from Aheadworks March, 2016)

Magento currently holds about 30% of the market share for e-commerce platforms. This percentage is most likely to increase as the version gets older. With time Magento 1 will be slowly phased out, in effect adding to the towering presence of Magento 2 stores globally. This growth will also be propelled further by brand new webshops and online businesses entering the market. Magento Commerce is actively reforming the merchant experience, enabling webstore owners to operate more efficiently and handle rapid growth, without scaling up teams.

If you are confused, there is little to no doubt that Magento 2 will become one of the market leading e-commerce website platforms in the years to come. Magento Commerce, VP Strategy – Peter Sheldon on December 21, 2016 announced the strategic acquisition of the technology powering Bluefoot CMS & Page builder module for Magento. This technology once integrated equips Magento merchants with a range of tools for content creation and management. This feature makes the addition of content like Products, images, maps possible with simplest Drag & Drop functionality while allowing edits to aspects of product description and blogs. The analytics wing known as Magento Business Intelligence enables the merchants to consolidate various data sources into a single Cloud-based Data Warehouse and solves the pressing need to have complex data storing infrastructure.

Magento 2 is in more ways than one paving a path to market domination. Magento, however has to be mindful of competition from other top platforms like Shopify and Woocommerce. It would be an understatement to just label Magento 1 as a success. However that success did not come over night, Magento 1 was first released in 2008 and today after 8 years of existence it is still going strong here in 2017.

So here are a few pointers to help you conclude how this upgrade is worth all the time, money & effort, some salient features of Magento 2 in comparison to its ancestor.

Improved performance: The upgrade promises a 20% jump in speed in comparison to its forerunner. E-commerce store owners understand the significance of increased site speeds and its direct link to Volume of Sales and the cascading effect of a Search Engine Optimized website. This increased speed is attributed to the Full-Page Caching built into the platform, enabling the pages to load faster, 1-2 seconds compared to the 5-10 seconds for non-cached pages. The improvement in page response and loading time is made possible by improving the way the application interacts with the browser. This is achieved by notably reducing the amount of data that must be returned from the server to render web pages by using the browser cache for storing assets. Even large store owners stand to benefit with the upgrade as it also handles multiple catalog pages without slowing down, making the switch scalable for large stores wanting to tap the potential of online business.

User-Friendly Checkout: In comparison to the earlier version the checkout process in Magento 2 is more streamlined, resulting in the fall of average time spent by customers from the cart to a successful order placement. Even the backend of checkout process has been redesigned for effective management. Being a highly customizable platform is an added advantage and it requires less steps and customer information. On the way to the checkout a customer is brought to default guest checkout screen and is made to enter an email address. If matched with an existing customer record, one is given an option to checkout faster with saved information. Finally reducing the checkout time means drastically reducing abandoned carts whilst significantly increasing conversions. All guests can create an account in one click from the Thank You page post order processing. These features make customers keep coming back for more.

The Extensions: Are you worried about the compatibility of extensions in Magento 2? Breathe a sigh of relief because the developers worked closely with all the big extension providers to ensure smooth transfer of all the existing extensions to Magento 2, while maintaining minimum data and functionality loss. However custom developed extension users may need to seek additional assistance to shield its functionality during the upgradation.

Secure Payment Gateway Integrations: The migration also promises many more payment gateway integrations unlike the previous versions. The new Magento platform comes with well chalked out integrations with PayPal, Braintree, and Authorize.net payment gateways. The Magento Enterprise Edition 2.0 also integrates with WorldPay and CyberSource. Both these versions provide enhanced security features while also maintaining the ability to naturally comply with PCI standards, varying from one payment method to the other.

Easier Maintenance and Upgrades: The design of the upgraded version effectively reduces the complexity while ensuring stable maintenance costs. The version helps the user insure and prepare for the future by simplifying subsequent upgrades. This naturally means that one can periodically incorporate all the operational and functional bug fixes as and when Magento Commerce releases them, thus facilitating WebShop owners to drive higher sales with increased efficiency.

All of these features make Magento 2 a highly efficient e-commerce platform famous for operating better at scale compared to its earlier versions. It is also steadily gaining in popularity for being performance driven while combining new functionality and flexibility. Magento 2 ensures that both the merchants and the end customers are treated to a customized digital shopping experience while equipping both for handling changing trends. Magento 2 is without a doubt the next-Generation solution that will fuel your business into the future. Welcome to the next-generation of online commerce! 2017 is the perfect time to ride the Magento 2 wave! Upgrade to Magento 2 now with offshore magento development at Coreway Solution.

How I Managed Monthly Sales of $100k With Shopify Store?

The buzzword of 2016 has been ecommerce, and why not! It is the fastest growing industry in the world; some of the biggest brands in the world are ecommerce giants. Ecommerce ensures that you run a business with minimal expenses whilst still standing to make a pretty penny.

There are many who still consider the online alternative of business as something of a rare possibility. This is often the case with people who are not well acquainted with the internet and are a little awed by the whole prospect of going online. While it is true that there are many conventional ideas that haven’t come online, retailing is something that has found a strong presence on the internet.

My purpose was simple to create a brand and make sure that it sustains itself from day one while achieving the set target sales. Every business requires a basic amount of research and that is exactly what I embarked upon. Retailing from brick and mortar stores was a thing of the past, the costs were too prohibitive, and even if they were not, the option was just too bankable to ignore. Online stores, when branded and marketed well, which are competitively priced, can make serious waves. However making one’s own ecommerce portal can be quite the task but with Coreway solutions it becomes easy and they get you rolling online with perfection.

The most important factor for online sales is to have an ecommerce portal that provides your online customers with an almost intuitive understanding of their shopping preferences. It is simply a matter of making the right architecture for the kind of products one has to sell. This was an understanding born of serious research. When I got to know of the Shopify Store, it was almost as if something clicked. Here was an ecommerce site that was providing me just the right infrastructure at the just the right price in order for me to increase my sales with little to no investment. It was a match made in heaven. Thanks to Coreway Solution for the understanding.

Here is the process I followed to ensure that I hit my targets.

Phase I:

My first target was to set up a robust online presence which justified my strong supply-chain and distribution networks, one of the perks of having been in the business for some time now. The online Shopify network made things extremely simple, my ecommerce portal was activated within a short window of time. The Shopify network gave me an exhaustive list of ideas on how I could convert my website into a shopping window to the world. This was something that took a little time to set in.

With able guidance from the Coreway team I managed to find the perfect ecommerce window on the website. The Store has over 100 different templates. Each one designed for a particular niche industry and set to provide them the most easy access and eye-catching design. I was ready for business.

Phase II:

You can only know how good a car is, once you drive it, said a famous Formula 1 driver. It is quite similar with ecommerce. And the metaphorical car I was riding purred along like a dream. Shopify Store’s easy content management system was a breeze to understand and made my job infinitely simple with expert guidance from Coreway Solution. I realized something quite profound in that moment, it does not take too much or too many to start a business, it just takes a good idea and the right support.

I came up with different products every month, keeping with the changing seasons. The overall content management is so easy that adding products and editing details became a hardly a task at all.

Security was something everyone had warned me about, when it came to ecommerce sites. Shopify Store, however, was a revelation. Their secure shopping cart allowed me to accept PayPal payments as well as credit cards such as Mastercard, Visa, Amex, among others. The Store has integrated with over 70 payment gateways to make sure that those hosting their stores on Shopify can have maximum flexibility with their transactions.

Phase III:

If we are to stretch the car metaphor, we would say that by now I was in the mood to really open this car up to its maximum speed. The month of November was nigh, and despite all predictions of doom the Store had been doing brisk business through the months of April through October. As the traffic began to pile up and orders poured in on account of the festive season and a host of other coalescing factors, I began to notice something interesting. The Store was holding up! Unlike the other website we had tried, there were no unseemly crashes at the height of traffic. The Shopify Store, I realized later, offers unlimited bandwidth and handles all updates with ease.

Over and above that, Shopify also brings into play search engine optimization, Google Analytics, advance ecommerce analytics along with a host of other features to give your store the edge it deserves. My store on Shopify was getting more exposure than a website could ever have gotten, and even if it would have, it would not have been as cost-effective as this!

November came and went and we made a killing on the Shopify Store. Here are the numbers:

last-month-sales

Phase IV:

This was the time when we decided to go mobile. The increasing popularity of the small screen market is not something I was going to ignore after seeing the huge benefits of the laptop market. The Shopify App Store once again proved to be a superior extension of the online Store and provided me with exactly the kind of online infrastructure I required.

I implemented this by the end of November and it is the middle of December and I am seeing a serious spike in the number of visitors the Store has received thanks to the mobile integration.

last-7-months-sales

Conclusion:

Long story short, it has been a long time coming, but my target of achieving $100k monthly sales has been achieved. As you can see from the graphic before the Shopify Store entered the picture, there was little to no business that we could boast of. And now, things are vastly different.

total sales in last 7 months
Thank you, Coreway & Shopify!