Electronic commerce or e-commerce is a wide range of online retail business activities for products, brands and services. It’s also considered as any form of business transaction where the parties interact through internet rather than having a tangible experience.

E-commerce is mainly referred as buying and selling over the Internet, or conducting any transaction involving the transfer of ownership or rights to use goods or services through a World Wide Web. This is a new age retail business phenomenon with a rapidly increasing customer base across the world. Traditional customers also shifting into this E Commerce shopping platform for a number of advantages, flexibility and facilities.
People love to shop and E Commerce provides so many advances in online retail so that consumers can shop anytime, anywhere with easy transaction, E Wallet facility & EMI options. This access & facilitating platform is unprecedented and it’s not just for shoppers’ benefit; but retailers also have 24/7 access to their consumers and all time open online showcasing of their products for their customers with bearing the least infrastructure cost. As a result, e-commerce has transformed & revolutionized the retail business model and changed the shopping definition.
However, 24/7 access seems not enough for shoppers. As per many survey there is a tendency amongst consumers to look for extra benefits in online shopping compared to the traditional one; such as convenience, lower prices or assortments, discounts, deals & offers, cash backs etc.. Therefore, e-commerce industry there is an all time competition between E commerce brands to attract customers with their unique business promotions. With this growing E Commerce boom, competitions also became fiercer and you need to provide the best e commerce shopping experience to retain your customers. Here comes the Magento Framework to give you the best E Commerce platform for your retail business.

E Commerce Portal with Magento:

Magento is an open source Framework for developing E Commerce portal. It’s written in PHP. Magento provides a flexible & user friendly shopping cart system with control over look & feel, major functions & modules, contents, SEO compatibility, marketing & sales, analytics, store management tools etc. Magento provides some distinct platforms like Magento Community Edition, Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Enterprise Cloud Edition. It has two previous platforms also called Magento Professional Edition and Magento Go. This Framework is majorly accepted for developing robust & advanced E Commerce platforms for its cutting edge features. Some of the esteemed users of Magento are Coca-Cola, Nestle, Burger King and so on.
Magento follows OOPs & MVC architecture & use MySQL / MariaDB RDBMS. The latest version of Magento is Magento 2.0 Framework and on top of that if also follows Model-View-View-Model pattern to front end coding using JavaScript library Knockout.js. Magento 2.0 was released in 2015 with many improved & advance features. This latest version was introduced to provide some advanced & beneficial features to the platform like, high user engagement, smoother navigation, advance & latest snippets & plugins, accelerate conversion rate & revenue generation, advance business & sales analytics, proper organized structure & productivity enhancement.

Major Key Features of Magento 2.0:

• Compatible, flexible and popular platform.
• Larger Community reference & support.
• Migration from prototype to JQuery.
• Faster & high performance than previous versions.
• Component oriented architecture.
• Added new directory called ‘pub’ which provides better and clearer view structure for the developer.
• Easy automated testing.
• Safer & Secure.
• Improved back end view and code structure.
• Magento UI Library.
• Using JQuery as default JavaScript library.
• Latest plugins & extensions.
• Secure with Payment Gateways and default integration of major gateways.
And many..

In Magento 2.0 Framework there are some added technologies included like, HTML5, CSS3, RequireJS, Apache 2.2, full page caching, CSS Pre-processor, Magento performance toolkit, Magento UI Library, MySQL5.6, PSR Compliance, and PHP 5.5x.

Some detailed benefits of Magento 2.0

Default theme and Admin GUI: Magento 2 platform introduced new default theme, codename as ‘Luma’, which is really an eye-catching theme that has some changes compared to previous version theme codename as ‘Madison Island’. The new theme provides tiles structure, typography, fully responsive images and better performance.

User Friendly Back end: Magento 2.0 released with a flexible, user friendly backend UI for store owners. Managing back end became simpler with this new Magento version release.

Better programming environment: Magento 2.0 provides better code quality & testing interface.

Multi Shopping: In Magento 2.0 platform customer can experience multi shopping with a single transaction.

Improved performance & scalability: Magento 2 introduces testing as a part of development. It has new technologies, better rapport with the community, new resources for documentation, improved scalability and performance, reduced upgrade costs and efforts.

Advance technology: It has advance plugins & extensions and with some advance technology introduced in the latest version, it outraces its top competitors like Shopify, Woocommerce and Prestashop etc.

User Friendly Checkout: Magento 2.0 has more streamlined, quicker and easier checkout process for customers to complete order. It’s a great feature for accelerating conversion rate & allover revenue. It requires lesser steps and customer info, and it’s highly customizable.

Responsive & Mobile Friendly: Magento 2.0 platform is fully responsive & ultimate mobile friendly. Also it’s SEO friendly too. Customers can have a great experience using this platform with their Smartphone & Tablets also.

Secure with Payments: Magento 2.0 is safer and secure with payment gateways. It has in built integrated major gateway solutions for transactions.

With all these above advantageous features altogether, Magento 2.0 is definitely one of the most popular & desired E Commerce platform for developers, users as well as store admin.