Magento

There are a lot of players in the market who offer free or paid e-commerce solutions for running an online store. Magento is most popular of these and according to Alexa Top 1 Million, 26% of all e-commerce sites are running on Magento. The best part about Magento is that you don't have to pay for using the Community Edition. There is an Enterprise Edition available as well, but in most scenarios Community Edition will fit your needs. Out of the box, you get a responsive theme which is mobile friendly. You need a good mobile friendly store in order to achieve sales nowadays and Magento provides just that. You can choose from a number of free themes for your store or pay between $50 to $150 for a quality theme to make your online store stand out. There is no restriction on the number of products you can sell. You can run multiple stores at a time with one common back end system. Most other e-commerce systems do not offer this flexibility. The built-in features include selling virtual products, coupon codes, newsletter subscription management, check out, a saved shopping cart, order status, gift cards, related products, wishlists, quantity discounts, zoomable images, re-orders and product reviews. When you first start using Magento the backend may overwhelm you. It will take time getting used. Magento offers easy integration with Authorize.net and PayPal. In fact Magento was acquired by eBay 2011 and, therefore, it is tightly integrated with PayPal in ways that most other eCommerce systems are not. You have access to analytics and reports right on the dashboard. All the stats are easily viewable from the dashboard. The reports are comprehensive and keep you on top of everything. You can check out reports like total sales, best-selling products, refunds, abandoned shopping carts, most searched keyword and more.

Magento is not meant to be used by an average person with limited to none knowledge about coding. You will need to hire a professional for setting up your store and then for maintenance as well. The installation is also not as easy as other hosted e-commerce solutions or Wordpress WooCommerce. Although it has good integration with most of the services, you will need development knowledge in order to get some of them working. There is no customer support team which you can call or email. All your support is limited to the community forums unless you are a paying Enterprise customer.

Magento is fully scalable to grow and change as your business does. It does not restrict you like other e-commerce solutions, however, there is a steep learning curve for merchants who are not tech savvy. What you will be saving in terms of product cost, you will be spending in development and maintenance. If you are looking for a more hands-on solution where you are spending less time learning new things and just concentrating on adding and selling products, then you should try Shopify or similar solutions. Magento is aimed at Enterprises which have high transactions and turnover.