Magento & other ecommerce CMS applications for web
Magento has secured its top position of Best E-commerce CMS for last few years consistently without a break. No other E-Commerce CMS could stand before Magento in any manner including default functions, user support or functional extensibility. But making a fare comparison is a best way to prove the fact that why every PHP developer loves this CMS or why a web development services providing company prefers Magento over other E-commerce CMS like ZenCart, OsCommerce etc. First we will review a brief about Magento and then points which make Magento superiors to other E-Commerce CMS.
Magento and Its weapons:
Magento has a vast list of functions and features with it, few basic features are available with almost every open source e-commerce cms like category/subcategory management, product management, customer management, physical and downloadable product availability, multilingual as well as multicurrency support, customer order management, secure transactions and product reviews with review management. But where does other lacks? in this concern we need to check few things like support community of the CMSs, where Magento has one of the largest community supports and this also makes Magento to own a largest number of addons in comparison to any other E-commerce CMS. These addons or extensions were developed based on requirements of Magento users and helps others who has same problem or desire with their Magento websites and using these extensions a great level of extensibility can be implemented on Magento core system very easily.
Apart from extensions few of the default functions also make the Magento king of other E-Commerce CMS like multiple integrated payment & shipping gateways to make sure your customers do not have to worry about payments and shipping, customer group management to manage customers based on their needs, product back order functions to help your customers to place orders when they are not available at your store, ability to manage sales from calls to make sure any landing call does not go waste, along with multicurrency and multilingual Magento also offers multi store capability to its users, cross sell and up sell functions to make your customer buy more and more, multitier pricing for multiple customer groups, Ability to generate sitemaps automatically for search engines to crawl them, wishlists to allow your customers to save products for future buying, invoices and shipping label for inventory management and to ease your customers while reviewing the product a default zoom functions.
On Other Hands:
Surprisingly other E-commerce CMSs like OSCommerce, ZenCart or X-Cart etc are missing some of the features which would have made them leading ones. Like OSCommerce misses multi store function, cross selling options and SEO friendly options and sometimes these small functions and features make points while developing websites and web admin cannot overlook them. Similarly Zen Cart and X-Cart do lack some features which magento provides as default ones like multistore, iPhone optimization, module installations, email template management, product comparison, upsell and cross sell options and wishlists.
Conclusion:
“An easy and eye catching thing is good for you”, not stays true always. May be you find customizing Magento a bit harder than others but the highly coupled features and functions are reasons of this most secure e-commerce platform. May be you find coding structure a bit complex but this makes hackers to stay away from your website. There are lots of things you may not like about Magento but that will stay useful for others. So keeping this fact in mind we just compared Magento with others on the basis of functions and features they have or they lacks.
So next time you are developing an E-commerce website, we wish you will choose the best option based on your exact need and requirement.