Magento is an e-commerce platform used by businesses to sell their products online. It is suitable for all sizes, from SMEs to corporate brands. Studies show that Magento covers 20% of all e-commerce shops, making it one of the most popular e-commerce systems.

Among the abundance of choices available on the market today, the Magento e-commerce platform has quickly emerged to dominate the e-commerce landscape in recent years. It is currently adopted by 12% of e-commerce sites.

According to official data published by Magento, more than 250,000 merchants are using the platform, including some of the biggest names such as Christian Louboutin, Ford, HP Inc., and Nike.

Last year, Gartner positioned Magento, for the third year in a row, as a Leader in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Digital Commerce Platforms Research Report - a win that demonstrates the platform's steady growth, robustness, and cutting-edge technology.

Difference between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce :

Magento Open Source: Known as Magento Community in the past, Magento Open Source is the free version of Magento that anyone can download, customize and host themselves. Users can also access several extensions and themes. Open Source has been the preferred choice for many small and medium-sized businesses.

Magento Commerce: There were previously two versions of Magento, Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. However, it is now one version - Magento Commerce, which is also a premium version for higher levels of support, offering a wide range of features. In terms of Magento eCommerce pricing, the license fee starts at $24,000 per year and allows for more features, customer reward programs, targeted promotions, and 24/7 support. In addition, companies can choose an on-premise deployment or host the solution in the cloud.

The most important features of Magento :

1. Order management: The "Order management" feature of Magento Commerce allows clear and feasible inventory management (including returns), even in the case of multiple sales channels and sites.
2. Magento Commerce optimized for mobile phones: The platform integrates mobile-friendly checkouts, adapted themes, progressive web applications, etc.
3. Open-source platform and huge ecosystem: Unlike most of its major competitors like Shopify and BigCommerce, Magento was designed as a free and open-source e-commerce platform. Since it is open-source, it is customizable, flexible, and extensible.
4. Ecosystem and community for developers: For example, Meet Magento is an event, held in many countries, organized by the Magento community where partners, freelancers, and merchants can meet to discuss trends, features, and challenges.
5. Shop speed and performance: There are modules for Magento such as MagePack to improve the speed of the frontend. Magento Commerce supports Horizontal Autoscaling to provide stable performance during traffic peaks, such as Black Friday sales.
6. Payment options: Magento Commerce supports the most popular payment options (Bank transfer, PayPal, Authorize.net, Google checkout, Amazon payment, Cash on delivery)
7. Magento Chat: Online chat is a way for merchants to manage their virtual shops as they would a physical shop, solving site visitors' problems in real-time.
8. Magento multi-site and multi-store management: The platform allows you to add and manage multiple shops from a single dashboard, which significantly reduces shop management time.
9. Magento Customer Relationship Management (CRM): CRM is part of the Magento administration panel, with an easy-to-navigate dashboard. Companies can integrate Magento with marketing automation software and use Magento CRM data to power automated campaigns.
10. Promotional and personalization tools: These include: Personalization tools: Magento offers to segment customers using a set of criteria and promotions tailored to each visitor. Product recommendations: By analyzing customer behavior, Magento offers product recommendations adapted to customers. Visual merchandising: Magento also proposes the organization of products according to filters such as best-sellers, color, highest margin, new products...
11. Catalogue management and on-site search: Thanks to Elasticsearch, Magento has a powerful product search engine that allows customers to find the product they are looking for. It offers suggestions for spelling mistakes, synonym management, attribute weighting, empty word support, and much more.
12. Reporting and Analytics: Magento Commerce's Business Analytics feature is one of the platform's most valuable selling points. It allows companies to gain insight into the health of their business (Average order value, Customer lifetime value, Customer Retention rates).