Being the curious sorts we are, we set about analysing why this was happening. We know, obviously, all the reasons why a business would choose Magento as its ecommerce management application – read our What is Magento? page to find out for yourself.

But we were most interested in finding out if there was one reason in particular that so many websites were now converting to Magento at such a fast pace. Based on the inquires we receive and from our own research, we discovered that the number one reason most stores convert, was Magento’s ability to help businesses grow very quickly.

It makes a lot of sense. To have all Magento’s features built from scratch, bespoke to fit a one-off in-house CMS system would cost a development fortune. Of course the advantage of a bespoke system is that it has been built specifically to the requirements of that company.

So if we consider that Magento is an open source application, fully customisable to the extent of any in-house system, we can begin to understand why so many businesses are turning to Magento.

By increasing the functionality of an online business (search engine friendly URLs, Google Analytics integration, batch product updates, sales reports etc) without having to fork out huge development costs, online stores and sales can grow fast.

That’s why Magento is a platform for growth in 2010. So what are your plans for the new year? If you’d like our help developing Magento or are just interested in what it can do for your business, please get in contact via our Magento Development Form or give us a call – we’ll be happy to help.

We’ve recently created several customised features for the Magento system. For the guys at Fun4Kids.co.uk, we built a batch shipping system that allowed them to view all paid, but unshipped orders.

This bespoke facility then ships either individual items or the entire order (or even a specific quantity) as a batch process rather than having to go into each order individually. So you can imagine the huge amount of time and resources this process saves when dispatching orders.

We’re also currently working on a complex import system for the website Megafit.com. This facility will enable Magento to read data feeds from a supplier including all product prices, product descriptions, images, stock and categories.

This process can be especially difficult; supplier information won’t necessarily be available in a standardised format (i.e. broken/invalid XML etc) as was the case in this example. We had to write code that would clean-up this data first, generating usable information that could then be imported to work within the Magento system automatically.

Again this resource is set to save our client a huge amount of time and money when it comes to data entry and when launching the website ready for sales.

So there we have it – you don’t have to just play the cards you’re dealt; if the grass could be greener then why not build yourself a custom Magento bridge straight to it.

For information on what customised Magento modifications we could build for you, please get in contact for an informal chat.

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