Magento is a powerful platform for eCommerce startups and other new businesses. It combines a robust yet intuitive back-end with an appealing, highly-customizable front-end. The result is a great user experience, both for customers and store managers.

It’s no surprise then that Magento powers over 40% of eCommerce stores worldwide. Brands like Coca-Cola, Burger King, Tom Dixon, or Charlotte Tilbury all use Magento.

Magento comes out of the box with all the essential features your startup website needs. However, it can be further extended with thousands of modules and themes, which you can find in the new Magento Marketplace.

For site developers, Magento offers few if any limitations. Whether you want to build a simple store or an experimental one, Magento unleashes your creativity.

That said, building a successful startup web store comes with many challenges. You need more than a powerful platform like Magento to engage customers and keep them. Here’s what you need to build a great web store with Magento.

1. Rich Mobile Experience
In a world where so many mobile users shop on their phones and tablets, a successful eCommerce site needs more than mobile support. It must provide a rich user experience, with high-quality images, multiple product display views, and product visualization features.

Mobile users shouldn’t feel that they are missing anything from your desktop web store. Magento allows for the development of a mobile-rich eCommerce experience. From the first page to the last, your site feels hand-made for mobile users.

Magento is a powerful platform for eCommerce startups and other new businesses.

2. Affordable Development
Magento offers great value for every dollar spent on professional web development. That said, as a startup you don’t want to burn too much money on unnecessary features. With Magento there’s virtually no limit to what you can do with an eCommerce site. That’s why it’s important to know when to stop.

Startups who develop only the web store features they need have an advantage over the others. They can put more money into marketing, performance optimization, or community-building. Because of the wealth of options that come with Magento, developing a store on this platform is more than affordable.

3. Outstanding Performance
Performance is often a challenge for web stores with a large catalog. There’s nothing more annoying for a customer than to wait for a long list of products to load. Or for a product video to start streaming. And yet it happens all the time, even with the best of stores.

However, the latest Magento installment brings the fastest web store experience to date. When you combine Magento’s out of the box speed with a high-quality web hosting plan, you get a really fast store. Often, that’s all it takes to win over customers from sluggish competitors.

4. Personalized Experience
Most eCommerce startups face stiff competition at the time of their launch. This is especially true for stores selling health, beauty, food, fashion, or technology products. A powerful way for a new store to stand out is by providing a personalized user experience.

Magento supports a wealth of tools that allow stores to provide unique products. These include custom web to print, custom tailoring, virtual trial room, and product design modules. Empowering users to create their own unique products has never been easier.

5. Social Media Integration
For many eCommerce stores, social media has become the best marketing platform available. Whether we are talking about Facebook ads or YouTube product reviews, social media is cheaper than traditional advertising. Often, it also reaches a wider audience and allows for more targeted marketing.

Magento integrates flawlessly with all the major social networks. It allows you to add social media logins, comments, likes and more to your site. All these help you build a vibrant community of fans and followers. This is one of the key conditions for your store to survive in today’s competitive online market.

6. Engaging Design
For eCommerce stores, a beautiful design is no longer enough. Consumers are used to beautiful web stores, and take attractive designs for granted. What really makes the difference between web store designs is the level of engagement they provide.

Everything from the shape and placement of the buttons to the login and order forms contribute to a store’s engagement rates. Magento enables developers to hand-craft engaging online stores. It does this through a wealth of customization options and extensions.

With Magento, you can systematically eliminate all the dull elements on a web store. You can make everything fresh and engaging. You can start from one of the many free or premium themes available. From there, you can build a highly-memorable, highly-engaging web store.

7. Fast and Easy to Use Backend
However well-developed and engaging a webstore may be, if it’s not easy to manage, it will cost you time. This in turn will leave you less time for running your business, hence costing you money.

Managing an eCommerce store is far from easy. Product pages and catalogs have to be constantly updated. Ratings and comments need to be monitored and moderated. Broken links need to be fixed before customers discover them. Also, many eCommerce stores integrate a blog which they manage through the backend.

All top eCommerce platforms enable you to manage these in one way or other. However, Magento lets you refine and improve the default backend experience through extensions. Once your work on the front-end is over, you shouldn’t ignore the backend. Simplify and streamline it as much as you can. With Magento it’s easy.

Build a Great Web Store with Magento
As you can see, there are plenty of challenges to building a compelling web store. But with Magento you can develop your store one area at a time, polishing every part of it until it shines.

You can optimize it for mobile users and personalize the customer experience. You can make the design more engaging and integrate social media into it. You can also improve the backend. Best of all, you can do this while keeping web development costs in check.

With Magento all this is possible. Try Magento now.