Exploring the Advantages of Enhancing Your Magento Platform Experience

• By Simon Walker
• 05-06-2024
• E-commerce

In today’s digital landscape, product quality does not matter as much as the overall online buying experience. Even if you offer top-quality products, your users won’t convert to customers until the entire journey is personalised to suit their unique requirements. Therefore, it is imperative to select the right eCommerce platform and then enhance it further.

Among the various eCommerce platforms, Magento 2 stands out as one of the best options. However, ask any Magento 2 development company and they’ll agree that having a presence on Magento 2 is no longer a guarantee of success. The primary reason is the increase in online competition. With more and more eCommerce stores popping up, remaining relevant can prove to be a challenge.

There are various ways to improve customer loyalty and retention. One way is to change the pricing strategy. But lowering prices to drive sales is not recommended. The reason is that it is not sustainable, and your audience will become accustomed to lower prices. The moment you increase prices, your customers will run away since the lower prices were your main selling point.

Hence, the best course of action is to devise a strategy that is sustainable. Based on our experience, enhancing the platform experience is a proven and effective way to drive long-term growth in eCommerce. Of course, platform experience is a broad term. Therefore, there’s a need to narrow it. This article will discuss what we mean by the platform experience and different ways to enhance it.

Why Choose Magento 2?

Magento is an eCommerce powerhouse and one of the most widely used eCommerce platforms globally. Why do the world’s top eCommerce stores prefer Magento? There are a wide range of reasons, including customisation. Magento allows you to customise each aspect of your store, thereby allowing you to tailor it to your unique requirements.

If customisation is not convincing enough, then know that it is scalable. As your business grows, your Magento store grows with it. This is why Magento is the preferred choice for large and small businesses. Since it is an open-source platform, you can integrate third-party extensions to add advanced functionality. Other popular eCommerce platforms put restrictions on what you can customise.

What is Meant by Enhancing the Platform Experience?

When we talk about enhancing the platform experience, it is not just about setting up an engaging store. Instead, the focus is on optimising every aspect of the store. The purpose is to deliver a compelling user experience, boost store performance, and streamline operations either by cutting non-value processes or automating repetitive ones. This will ultimately drive long-term growth.

Understanding Magento Platform Enhancement

Let’s talk about the areas where you can consider improving the experience and how it benefits your store.

1. Page Loading Speed

Whether you like to admit it or not, we are becoming less patient. Just consider the example of online shopping. As soon as we order a product, we begin waiting for its delivery. If there’s a slight delay in the shipment, we bombard the store’s customer service department with emails and phone calls. The same is applicable to internet browsing. When a website takes longer than usual to load, we end up frustrated.

In our frustration, we simply close the tab while cursing the site owner for poor website performance. The next step is to simply open the next website. From a store owner’s perspective, this means lost sales. When a visitor turns to a competitor website, it will impact the market share as well. Eventually, if there is no improvement in loading speeds, the store owner will lose all customers to competitors.

Therefore, one of the first focuses when talking about enhancing the platform experience is to improve page loading times. Engage any Magento 2 development company and they’ll recommend using content delivery networks (CDNs) and optimising images to reduce loading times. Reducing the HTTPS requests and optimising the code are other ways to improve loading times.

For the best results, your website should load within 3 seconds. If it takes longer, you should see it as an obstacle towards sustainable growth. We recommend engaging a specialist Magento 2 development company to improving a website’s loading time. Given their vast experience and skills, website speed optimisation is not a challenge for them.

If you are not convinced about improving the loading times, look at the below statistic.

Source: Statista

The image shows how long mobile users are willing to wait before a web page loads completely. You may think that 3 seconds is too much considering the majority users are willing to wait more than 3 seconds. However, this study is based on 2011 data. The internet speeds have improved considerably since then and smartphones have become more advanced. Today, 3 seconds is the norm!

2. Automation

With artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) becoming mainstream, it is only natural to expect store owners to experiment with automation. There are several third-party Magento 2 extensions that can automate several areas of your online store. For instance, seamless inventory management is a key success factor for any business, whether online or a traditional brick-and-mortar store.

After all, if a business fails to order the correct product at the right time, it amounts to lost sales opportunities. If they overstock a product, it is inefficient use of resources. After all, inventory requires capital. When you stock too much, you have tied up capital that can be used elsewhere. For instance, invest in a premium extension. There are numerous extensions available for Magento 2 inventory management.

These extensions automate key aspects of inventory management. For example, whenever stock is low, the extension will automatically create an alert or place the order with the supplier directly. The quantity will be dependent upon various factors, including past sales data. The extension can also be helpful in informing customers when out-of-stock product is restocked.

Automation can prove helpful in analytics and reporting. For instance, you can create a custom extension using a Magento 2 development company to automate your entire reporting process. The extension can obtain data from multiple sources, such as customer feedback, website analytics, and other reports. After analysing the data, the extension can create engaging and informative dashboards.

3. Streamlined Checkout Process

Another key area to focus on is the checkout process. In any business, the checkout stage is the most critical part. Users add numerous products to their cart but end up abandoning it. The below figures provide valuable insights into cart abandonment issues plaguing eCommerce.

Source: Statista

As the above image indicates, the cart abandonment rate is almost 70 per cent. This rate has been relatively stable for the past 10 years, which indicates failures in addressing the problem.

Source: Statista

The above figure shows the cart abandonment rate by category and device type. As you can see, in various cases, the rate is more than 80 per cent. There are various explanations for cart abandonment, including prices, hidden taxes, non-availability of preferred payment channels, and shipment-related problems. Regardless of the reasons, cart abandonment is a concern for online store owners.

Therefore, there is a perpetual need to keep optimising the checkout process. There are various ways to enhance the checkout process, including allowing customers to complete the purchase without signing up. Secondly, asking for minimal information to speed up the process is known to improve sales and reduce cart abandonment rates. Thirdly, providing multiple payment methods is also beneficial.

4. Safeguarding Privacy

If you do a little research, you’ll learn that every individual worldwide is concerned about their privacy. In their quest for dominance, businesses have gone to great lengths to gather as much data as possible. Unfortunately, too often, this comes at the risk of a user’s security. The best course of action is to establish a balance between business requirements and user privacy.

There are no doubts regarding Magento’s security. It is a highly secure platform which has been designed without compromising on security. However, threats are always evolving and there’s a need to go beyond the existing measures. As a store owner, you must implement SSL encryption for secure transactions and regularly update the platform to install the latest security patches.

Consider the below statistic for better understanding.

Source: Statista

The above image shows consumer attitudes towards security in online shopping worldwide based on consumer spending. As is evident, every customer values online security. For example, the percentage is close to 90 per cent for all customer groups. Therefore, we can easily conclude that having robust security measures instills confidence in customers. They are more likely to complete their purchases.

It is also essential to ensure compliance with relevant regulations. For example, the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation applies to all businesses that handle EU citizens data. If you deal with EU customers, it is imperative to showcase your compliance with the GDPR. Of course, as a Magento store owner, no one expects you be a legal expert.

However, there are various Magento 2 GDPR extensions that you can use. These extensions allow for easier compliance with the GDPR. Similarly, if there are specific laws governing eCommerce in your country, make sure you display badges that highlight your compliance. It can go a long way in boosting your store’s credibility and instilling trust among the target audience.

5. Advanced Features

Furthermore, setting up your Magento store is only the first step. To truly establish yourself as an online powerhouse, you need to set up advanced features. These features either need to be set up manually or you may require custom Magento extension development services. Keep in mind that, unlike Shopify, there’s no limit to what you can customise in Magento.

It is challenging to pinpoint and mention which advanced features you need to turn on since it depends on various factors. Nevertheless, we’ll mention a few notable ones. One such feature is Elasticsearch, which store owners need to set up manually. This feature shows related keywords and complete queries based on the query. In other words, it enhances users’ search capabilities.

There are several benefits of using this feature. First, it enhances sales performance since the store will display associated keywords and queries rather than return a ‘no results’ error. Secondly, it helps users find relevant products without spending a great deal of time browsing your store. Another feature that you need to experiment with is customer segmentation.

This feature allows you to segment customers based on unique characteristics. You can set up special prices and discounts for different customer segments. This allows you to reward high-value customers. While Magento has built-in features related to customer segmentations, using premium extensions is recommended. The reason is that they offer much more advanced capabilities.

Magento does not offer in-built blog feature. In eCommerce or any other businesses, blogs are critical to your search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy and showcasing your expertise in the niche. Therefore, get an extension to set up a blog right away. Other notable advanced features that you need to set up include tiered pricing and customer relationship management system.

Conclusion

If you have an eCommerce store, don’t sit around and wait for customers, because that’s not how things work. Instead, you need to enhance your Magento store’s experience and tell customers why your store is the best option. This article has discussed five different ways you can enhance the platform’s experience. We highly recommend that you experiment in these areas to realise the maximum benefits.

If you have already made the relevant enhancements and still don’t see any noticeable improvements, we recommend engaging a specialist Magento 2 development company. Their experience can prove highly beneficial in transforming your store from just another online store to the only choice for customers. Therefore, don’t wait any longer and start looking for your Magento 2 partner.