How Good Magento is for Your E-commerce Website Development?

Empowering over 2,00,000 online retailers, Magento is emerging as a popular choice for building robust e-commerce website. As of now, Magento is the choice of platform of 1 for every 4 businesses. 

What is Magento? 

Magento is an open-source platform for building E-commerce websites. It uses Zend PHP and MySQL databases.  Magento comes broadly in two categories or editions. One is the enterprise edition, which offers extended features to e-commerce platforms and makes it a truly enterprise class platform. The other is a community driven open-source technology. Contrary to enterprise edition, community-driven edition is available for free to download and customize by Magento e-commerce developers. 

Editions of Magento

As mentioned earlier, there are two versions: one is enterprise edition and the other is a free community version. The latter is more on the lines of WordPress CMS with some more E-commerce related functionality. On the other hand, enterprise version has many added features such as minimum advertisement space, permission for price and promotion, CMS (content management system), call center software for assisting shoppers and delivering a good customer experience, targeted offerings with respect to the previously viewed products, and an enhanced catalogue. Although most of these features can also be implemented through paid plugins in community version, the page load speed does take a beating when you use many plugins on a page.

One very important feature that enterprise version provide is the automated SEO optimization of your e-commerce website. This includes generation of human-friendly URLs and Google site map, and customized keyword and meta-description.

Both the editions are efficient and scalable. It means that if you are scaling up the operation of your E-commerce business and moving up from selling 5 products to 5,000 products, there is not much of the work needed on complete overhaul of the website. Another point worth mentioning is the support for m-commerce. Visitors can easily open your website and do the transaction through multiple payment options from their smartphone. Website built on Magento are highly-responsive, as they provide a host of features, such as full access to catalogue, embedded payment gateway, inventory and checkout, to those who are arriving using mobile users. 

Conclusion

Magento is an extremely powerful solution for serious businesses build around e-commerce model. A little technical expertise is always required if one wants to capitalize on the host of features it provide but for building and operating an online store is extremely easy for owners with no coding skills.  

Why Your Business Needs An Enterprise App Now?

Enterprise apps are revolutionizing the way a business operates. The on-demand economy initially forced many startups to venture into enterprise app’s territory to empower their contractual or permanent workforce. Now this trend is embraced by many other medium and large scale companies, and there are a good number of reasons for that. 

Enterprise applications make the access to corporate data for employees easier. In BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) model, any employee is free to choose her device in order to log into the enterprise app and interact with a company’s data on the move. 

 

There are many factors responsible for the popularity of enterprise apps.

1.       Big Data is going mainstream as more and more companies are using advanced analytics to crunch the heap of data to develop valuable insights. The access to such insights on the move helps field workers to leverage on it and be more productive.  

2.       SaaS  (Software-as-a-Service) applications are widely popular and are playing a huge role in consolidating enterprise mobility by leveraging cloud computing.

3.       Real-time access to information keeps employees updated with recent changes. 

4.       The idea of working from anywhere is increasingly getting more popular among employees and employers. Enterprise apps make the whole world a workplace for employees.

Do your business need enterprise apps?

It is not that you absolutely need an enterprise app to make your workforce more productive. It all depends upon the business model of the company. Some enterprises simply cannot work for even a  single day without such applications, while others can simply avoid the cost of developing enterprise applications without sacrificing on productivity. 

Finding some answers will help you in deciding whether or not you should spend your resources.

1.  Do you have a field sales team? If yes, does it require to be in touch with company’s data
2.  Do you think your employees will perform better if given a more robust working environment? 
   
3.  Is your customer tech-savvy? Do the all-time-connectivity enables your employees to serve the customers better?

If the answers to such questions were a “Yes”, you will definitely get benefited from enterprise mobility facilitated through enterprise apps.

Why To Go The SaaS Way?

On-demand is in demand. It is a new economy of sharing the resources. You can call a taxi using Uber app; the food startups are also the fine example of on-demand economy, which is shaping the way we interact with businesses. 

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are on-demand software, which are shared by other users and applications. These are centrally hosted and licensed on a subscription based model.  

Why SaaS?

1.       It frees the users (or enterprises) from overhead costs required to secure and maintain hardware (server) and software. The SaaS users can access any SaaS application at any time and all they need is an Internet connection.

2.       SaaS applications, when used by enterprises, makes it easier for IT staff to monitor and manage data usage and privileges. Any edits made in the information can be quickly accessed by all the employees, no matter what their physical location is.

3.       Although there have been a lot of talks around the security related issues of cloud, SaaS applications are time-tested solutions and are getting widely adopted and improved upon. The data can be easily stored without the worry of someone accessing it without the required privileges.

4.       SaaS model emphasizes on the ease-of-use. It is point-and-click easy to customize the software in contrast to traditional business software that demanded a great deal of time and money for making the customizations possible.

There is no denying the fact that SaaS applications are cost-effective, easily manageable, and allows a better access. It is easily scalable, thanks to pay-for-subscription or on-demand model. Reducing dependency on local server allows stakeholders, including employees, to be connected and hence be productive on the move. 

Octal Info Solution has the expertise in SaaS application development. For last many years, we have been helping the businesses of any scale in embracing SaaS applications in order to be more efficient and profitable.