Magento is unarguably one of the largest website platforms that offers remarkable e-commerce solutions for small and large-scale businesses, firms, and personal projects.
It is an easy go-to for programmers and is currently being used by big industry players like Ford, Samsung, Christian Louboutin, Lenovo, Fox Connect, Coca-Cola, and Nike because of its open-source feature and the customizable features it offers. So if you have shopped online before or you do so often, it is very likely you have gone through a website that was built with Magento.
Stats show that as at 2017, more than 220,000 websites were active on the Magento platform. Today, the numbers have risen to well over 250,000 websites worldwide.
[gads]
Originally founded a decade and a year ago by Varien, Magento announced the launch of its premier beta client in the seven months that followed the software’s launch. It was also named after magenta, which was the color used for its first logo. Its current logo and name are, however, inspired by a popular game called Dungeons and Dragons.
Today, Magento boasts two versions – the free edition, which is also known as Magento Community, and Magento Commerce for enterprises.
The community created by Magento is run as such. It has an annual eCommerce conference of users, merchants, developers and partners. The first of this kind held in Los Angeles, USA in 2011 with over 600 people in attendance. However, the community currently boasts of over 800,000 users who come from over 73 countries from all around the world.
12 months after Magento was founded, it recorded 500,000 downloads and acquired over 50,000 merchant users that same year. In fact, till date, the word ‘Magento’ is a more searched word than the term “eCommerce” on the Google search engine.
[gads]
While most other website builders don’t require coding and so take away the flexibility that should come with owning your own website, Magento is designed for the avid programmer and allows a great deal of flexibility. It also is best suited for dedicated or VPS hosting, as the platform is not the lightest content management system out there. Luckily, discount hosting plans are not so hard to come by these days.
Now, that’s a challenge for non-programmers because the platform requires a certain level of coding competence. It also means that creating a website will be a herculean task without the requisite coding knowledge. To put it mildly, the platform is for coders who don’t want to start from scratch.
For starters, Magento’s source code has 11 programming languages and they include HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP, CSS, ActionScript, XML schema, and MXML. Also, in data storage, it uses “entity.attribute.value” – all of these will probably not make sense to you if you are not familiar with programming.
Let’s go a few paces down memory lane to show you bits and pieces of the behind-the-scenes of Magento’s development.
In developing Magento, most of it, an estimated 99.9%, was developed in the Ukraine and that development, over the years, has taken 2514 years in man-hour efforts at a cost of $138,254,110.
[gads]
Today, the average salary earned by PHP developers of Magento is within the range of $73,000 and $103,000 with a good number of these developers in the U.S, Canada, Germany, India and Ukraine.
It also boast a gross merchandise of $100 billion every year while merchants who sell on the Magento platforms sold $101 billion worth of merchandise to over 51 million customers in 2016.
Moreover, of the 14,500 stores that use Magento’s platform, 6 out of 10 merchants run outfits that are business-to-business or business-to-customer in nature. And by projections, their customer base on their Magento-based websites would have increased by 200% in 2020.
By demographics, the country with the highest number of Magento users is the United States with a wide 100,000 margin between the numbers in the UK and Netherlands.
Revenue-wise, Magento has made $4.2billion in revenue and that figure is expected to grow to $14.2billion in 2020.
With Magento-based websites, like websites built on other platforms, security is always a major concern and the history says a few things about the issues customers and business owners who shop and own websites built with Magento have experienced or may be exposed to.
According to a recent survey, a significant 85% of eCommerce websites that have been hacked over the last decade have been Magento websites. And of the stores listed on the platform, at least 62% of them are prone to one security issue while 14% have over 4 security issues to deal with. In fact, it was recently discovered that over 4,000 stores that use the platform were exposed to attacks like cross-site scripting.
Stores can now choose to remain on the Magento 1 version or hop on to the Magento 2 version which is an improvement on the technical issues that the old version has. That said, it’s been discovered that stores that sell clothing accessories and products form the majority of those who use Magento.x1 while Magento.x2 is mostly used by stores that sell footwear, toys, computers, electronics, and cosmetics.
