Why Magento Is the Better Option to Build Your Online Store

The rise of Internet commerce led to the online shopping portal. Also called "shopping cart software," a number of competing apps over the years have tried to be the one-stop, drop-in online storefront of choice.

But Magento has emerged as the most popular eCommerce platform, combined with its capabilities as a CMS. Its market share has been estimated at roughly 30% of all eCommerce sites.

Magento, like all the most popular web applications, is open source and originally developed by a start-up. After launching in 2007, it gained a sponsor in eBay by 2011, before ultimately being acquired by Adobe in 2018.

Now that it's supported by one of the oldest software companies on Earth, Magento promises an enduring platform with a thriving user community behind it. Let's find out how to install Magento:

Magento in its open-source version is available free from the Adobe portal. Simply go to the download page and follow the instructions for your chosen version. Note that Magento also comes in a paid version, Magento Commerce, which is a platform as a service, and offers three sizes of support package for small business, mid-market, and enterprise.

What you're getting here is an open-source install of the base software, exactly as if you were installing Wordpress on your website.

System requirements: Magento runs only on Linux systems, on both the Apache and NGinx servers, with MySQL and PHP. This is the standard LAMP stack provided by most web hosts, so there shouldn't be an issue as long as your PHP install is up to date.

Install steps:

• Upload the zip file to your server and unzip it.
• Create a database and name it anything you want.
• Run the Magento installer by opening the installer URL in a tab of your web browser.

• You should see a window with "Welcome to Magento Admin, your online store headquarters" here.
• Once you click to go ahead, Magento will check your server for software compatibility.
• When it gets to the "add a database" step, give it the name of the database you created in step 2.

• The next step is "web configuration." Add your store URL, and the page you want to admin from.
• It will also ask you for encryption options. If you have your own preferred key already prepared, you can use it, but otherwise you're just as well off using Magento's defaults.

• At the final steps, pick some store options like time zone and preferred currency units, create your admin user name and password, and hit install.

For a more detailed overview, visit Magento's own Getting Started guide. Extensive documentation for both users and developers is available there as well.

Once successfully installed and signed in, you'll find yourself at a dashboard page which will look very familiar if you've ever used Wordpress.

Magento's features:
Magento's user interface is infinitely customizable. A quick browse of template stores will show Magento can be adapted to your business' branding, is both desktop and mobile compatible, and can look as good as any professional commercial website.

The Magento GitHub page lists links to a full library of documentation, features, tutorials, and customization. There are many third-party plug-ins available as well since the open-source platform gives it access to an empowered developer community. But a brief list of major features of Magento would include:

• Manage multiple stores from one account
• Assign levels of user permissions to staff
• CMS for creating pages

• Online checkout cart
• Integration with payment processing services such as PayPal, Amazon Payments, and Google Checkout
• Credit card and payment processing tools

• Automatic tax and shipping fee calculation
• Full ordering, shipping, and address management features

In short, Magento is powerful enough to be everything you need to set up an online store. It's a one-size tool to support any range of businesses dealing in any variety of goods and services.

So far, we've gotten all this at zero cost. Opting for the Magento Commerce package opens up more service features.

Further resources:
One noteworthy aspect of Magento is its thriving entrepreneur community, with no end of peer support.

Magento has a dedicated section at Stack Exchange.

There is a Magento subreddit for further questions and a place to stay informed of community news.