Magento Commerce – now known as Adobe Commerce – is a powerful and popular platform that enables businesses of all sizes to create and manage their online stores.
With its rich set of features and customisable options, Adobe Commerce has become a go-to choice for many merchants looking to establish a strong online presence.
In this article, we will explore what Adobe Commerce is, why it is widely used, and the benefits it offers to ecommerce businesses.
Understanding Adobe Commerce
Magento is an ecommerce platform that was initially developed by Varien Inc. and released in 2008. It quickly gained traction in the market due to its robustness, flexibility, and extensive range of features.
In 2018, Adobe acquired Magento and integrated it into their suite of digital experience solutions, rebranding it as Adobe Commerce.
Overview: Magento Open Source vs Adobe Commerce
There are two platforms that fall under the Magento umbrella: Magento Open Source (now known simply as Magento) and Adobe Commerce. Let’s take a closer look at the differences between these editions and the advantages they offer:
Magento: Ideal for Small Businesses
Magento is the free and open-source version of the platform. This means that the platform’s source code is freely available for developers to modify and customise according to their specific requirements.
This flexibility allows businesses to create unique and tailored online stores that align with their brand identity and customer needs. It provides a solid foundation for small to medium-sized businesses looking to establish their online presence.
Adobe Commerce: The Solution for Medium to Large Businesses
Adobe Commerce is targeted towards larger businesses with more complex needs. Merchants using this platform will benefit from features such as advanced marketing and merchandising capabilities, customer segmentation, content staging, and more.
The platform also provides 24/7 customer support and access to a range of professional services to assist with implementation and ongoing management.
It’s particularly suited to Enterprise brands and B2B companies, including wholesalers, manufacturers and distributors.
The reason for this is that it offers advanced features and functionality, bespoke B2B capabilities, dedicated customer support, and cloud infrastructure options to ensure optimal performance and scalability.
Why Choose Adobe Commerce as your ecommerce platform?
There are several reasons why merchants choose Adobe Commerce as their preferred platform. Let’s explore some of the key advantages it offers:
1. Flexibility and Customisation
One of the standout features of Adobe Commerce is its flexibility and customisation capabilities. With Adobe Commerce, merchants have complete control over the design, functionality, and content of their online stores.
The platform allows for the creation of custom themes and templates, enabling businesses to create a unique and visually appealing storefront.
Additionally, Adobe Commerce offers a vast marketplace of extensions and integrations that can enhance the functionality of the platform. These extensions cover various aspects such as payment gateways, shipping providers, marketing tools, and more.
Merchants can easily install and integrate these extensions to tailor their online stores to their specific needs.
2. Extensive Feature Set
Adobe Commerce comes equipped with a comprehensive set of features that cover all aspects of running an ecommerce business. These features include:
- Inventory management
- Order tracking
- Integrated checkout, payment and shipping solutions
- Content management system (CMS)
- Page builders
- Product recommendations
- Analytics
- Marketing tools
The platform also supports both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) models, making it suitable for a wide range of industries and businesses.
Whether you’re a medium-sized retailer or a large enterprise, Adobe Commerce provides the necessary tools and functionalities to effectively manage and grow your online store.
3. Scalability and Performance
As businesses grow, their ecommerce platforms need to be able to handle increasing traffic and larger product catalogues. Adobe Commerce excels in this aspect, offering scalability and high performance even with high volumes of visitors and extensive product listings.
The platform is designed to handle large-scale ecommerce operations and can support multiple brands, currencies, and geographies from a single backend.
With features like caching, database optimisation, and scalable infrastructure options, Adobe Commerce ensures that merchants can deliver seamless and fast shopping experiences to their customers.
4. SEO-Friendliness
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for driving organic traffic to ecommerce websites. Adobe Commerce is known for its SEO-friendly features and capabilities, which enable merchants to optimise their online stores for better search engine visibility.
The platform provides tools and features such as meta tags, URL rewrites, XML sitemaps, and image alt text that help improve website rankings on search engine result pages.
Additionally, there are various SEO extensions available in the Magento Marketplace that can further enhance the SEO capabilities of the platform.
5. Complete B2B Functionality
Adobe Commerce comes complete with a set of B2B features that offer the perfect functionality for B2B businesses.
These features are designed to support the administration of the website for your in-house team, as well as provide a range of tools to help your trade customers on their user journey.
These B2B features include:
- Advanced Quoting
- Company Accounts
- Quick Orders
- Requisition List
- Shared Catalogues
- Customer Group Pricing and Discounts
- Purchase Orders
- Company Credit
- Advanced Shipping
- Inventory Management
Discover the full range of B2B features here.
6. Enhanced Security
Adobe Commerce safeguards user data with PCI compliance and tokenized payments, ensuring customer information and card details are securely encrypted and not stored on the platform. Access to this data is restricted to authorised personnel only.
The platform further bolsters security with multi-factor authentication, adding an extra verification layer to protect against unauthorised access.
Advanced machine learning in its fraud protection system proactively prevents fraudulent activities, while encryption technology secures online payments. Additionally, Adobe Commerce employs third-party security services to monitor for malicious activities, enhancing its overall security posture.
7. 24/7 Monitoring
In addition to the security measures in place with Adobe Commerce, the platform also includes the Site-Wide Analysis Tool (SWAT). SWAT is a self-service feature, which offers system insights and security recommendations to ensure your Adobe Commerce website remains operable.
It features continuous, real-time monitoring, providing reports and advice to flag any potential issues. These insights will keep you updated on your site’s overall health, security and configuration. This facilitates quicker issue resolution, improving site stability and performance
8. Faster loading times
Adobe Commerce’s integrated cloud service supports any size of ecommerce deployment, meaning you don’t need to compromise on speed as your business grows. With a built-in integration with Fastly’s CDN, the platform can handle all aspects of caching and content delivery.
It will also automatically optimise the display of your pages, from your category pages to your product pages. By enabling a full-page cache, your site will get faster and your shopper’s waiting time will get shorter.
9. Content staging
Content staging is a powerful tool to help you merchandise your website when and how you want. This feature will allow your team to create and preview a range of content updates.
When it’s ready to go, you can then schedule the content to turn on – and off – at a time of your choosing.
This will let you create bespoke content for special offers, new product launches, sale promotions, competitions and other events ahead of time.
With Content Staging, you don’t have to be ready to press ‘go’ at the stroke of midnight, or worry about missing important events.
Your Adobe Commerce Solution
Adobe Commerce is a powerful and feature-rich platform that enables businesses to create and manage their online stores effectively. With its flexibility, extensive feature set, scalability, and SEO-friendliness, it’s a popular choice among merchants of all sizes.
Whether you choose Magento or Adobe Commerce, the platform offers the tools and capabilities needed to succeed in the competitive ecommerce landscape.
By leveraging Adobe Commerce’s features, businesses can create engaging and successful online stores that drive sales and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Contact us to discuss your Adobe Commerce project here.