Top features of Magento

2012 marked the year when eCommerce became a trillion-dollar industry. The number of online customers is constantly growing, so there is no surprise in the fact that more and more people want to use the opportunity to claim their spot on the market of eCommerce services. In this article we are going to briefly discuss Magento, one of the most in-demand content management systems, and features it provides.

Here are the basics you need to know about why Magento is so popular among all groups of users:

Flexibility. Nowadays set in stone prices won’t help you win over and keep your clients. That’s why it’s so important to be able to “play” with prices and your marketing moves. Make discounts, special offers and even give away events and your clients will be happy.

Social shopping. Magento online stores encourage their clients to make shopping more social with such features as:  making wish lists, leaving comments and reviews, customer group-specific pricing and “share with a friend” feature.

Mobile commerce. Today more and more people shop using their smart phones and top website development companies try to respond to the demand by making sure that users will be able to view their web stores from their phones. Magento is no exception.

SEO-friendliness. If you want to gain more clients your first priority is making sure potential customers can find you. And SEO-friendly structure and tools that Magento offers help your online store become more visible on the internet.

International and shipping support. In the world where your potential clients live not only in your local area but in some of the most unexpected places in the world Magento website enables you expending your business by offering multilingual and multicurrency versions of your website.

And one last thing: those who are still doubtful about all the advantages of Magento might be interested to know that in June 2011 Magento shopping cart was acquired by EBay. Sounds like pretty reliable platform, don’t you think?

Messaging applications increase the audience each day

Today users have no lack in choice of a messaging mobile application. The market is represented by dozens different products that have already become an essential part of everyday life.

These messaging mobile applications, mainly with funny names like WhatsApp, Viber and WeChat, are now a kind of indispensable form of communication for hundreds of millions of people around the world.

They are also ranking technology giants and that is why when user sends messages using these mobile applications their mobile operators and device makers don’t directly profit from the interaction.

The experts ascertain that the use of the free messaging applications grows – they estimate the time spent on sending messages and stickers in about three to four hours a day. And the time of using other conversational channels such as social networks like Facebook has declined.

“In mobile applications for communication you have conversation so you can react by the minute”, say the users of the applications.

The mobile applications available for download to almost all kinds of devices are rapidly replacing the fixtures on smartphones from different companies.

According to some estimates a single text which may cost about twenty cents to send or receive costs the operators themselves only one-hundredth of a cent. The rise of texting mobile applications took away $23 billion in revenue from operators as of the end of 2012 according to market research firm Ovum.

But messaging applications face some problems as well. One of the main challenges is in converting their popularity into significant revenue. For example WhatsApp has no advertising and costs its users $1 a year. Kakao Talk with about 82 million subscribers generates revenue from sales of stickers, games, advertising and e-commerce store.