Magento is a widely-used eCommerce system for helping businesses around the world build a high-performant online retail store. Businesses love creating eCommerce websites using Magento to efficiently, securely cater to their customers.
With a global ecosystem of 150,000 developers and a network of 300+ highly-trained solution partners, the free open source software for eCommerce is handling over $100 billion in gross merchandise volume. And in addition to its flagship open source eCommerce platform, Magento integrates some strong cloud-based solutions, like order management and in-store, retail associate technologies. If you are looking to embark on a Magento store development journey, we have some help for you!
Step 1. Download Magento Installation Package
Actually, there is still a step you should not forget to make sure before starting with the installation: the technology stack requirements for Magento. The latest Magento 2.0.x version can work well only when your system meets the standard requirements, such as:
Operating System: Linux x86-64
Minimum Memory: 2GB of RAM
Web Server: Apache 2.2 or 2.4, Nginx 1.8
Database: MySQL 5.6
PHP: PHP 5.6+
.Mail Server: SMTP or MTA server
To manually install Magento, you need to download the latest installation package from the official Magento website (www.magento.com). But if your Magento hosting provider has pre-installed Magento on the server for you, you can easily and quickly install it in seconds. For example, with the Plesk Panel included with every Bisend hosting account, you can go to the Applications > All Available Applications page, and search for Magento to have it installed in 1 click.
Step 2. Upload Magento files on your server
Assume that you choose the manual installation manner, once you have downloaded the installation package, the next step is to upload it on your hosting server directly or using an FTP client. Additionally, you need to decide which folder you want to extract the content of the installation package in. If you extract it in the public_html folder, then it will be running from your main domain, like https://yourdomain.com; if you extract it in public_html/store/, it will be in a subfolder like https://yourdomain.com/store/.
Step 3. Create MySQL Database
As for creation of database, you would need to take advantage of your control panel. In the case of Plesk Panel, you need navigate to Websites & Domains > Databases page, create a MySQL database by specifying its name, and select a website on which the database will be used. Thereafter, create a default database user for accessing the database later.
Step 4. Create Categories
It is vital to structure your eCommerce website in a proper way since users will be navigating throughout it to finally order something. When you log into your Magento Admin menu, select Catelog > Manage Categories, you will find two categories in the list: Default Category and Example Category. You can choose to add root category or subcategory or both in accordance with your business needs. Then complete the general information and configure the category landing page to display both a static block and product list, or one or the other.
Step 5. Input Product Information
Clean, crisp and clear communication is always helpful for attracting users to buy that product, ultimately leading to good sales revenue. Usually, the product information includes name of product, visibility, country, pricing, images, meta information, description, short description, SKU, weight of the product, status, and URL key.
Step 6. Get Appealing Design
An aesthetically appealing website is the key to attracting online buyers. Magento, for that matter, offers thousands of free and paid responsive themes. Many are highly customizable and easy to use. They even facilitate an advanced admin module, multiple product listing, single click activation and more. In most cases, you just need to change the logo. But if you know CSS and want your website appearance to be unique, you can choose to customize your theme.
Step 7. Configure Shipping Methods
Magento support a wide range of shipping options and carriers, including flat rate, free shipping, table rates, online rates, and dimensional weight. Before you step into the next stage, you should complete the shipping settings to offer information about the point of origin of your online store, as well as which payment method you prefer to handle orders that are shipped to more than one addresses.
Step 8. Integrate Payment Methods
Payment is very important to run an online Magento store. The eCommerce solution enables PayPal payment integration by default. Besides that, you are allowed to implement many other payment methods, such as Amazon Payment, Sage Pay, and Google Checkout, to ease the checkout process for your customers.
Step 9. Set Up Transactional Email
Transactional emails are an efficient way to keep consumers engaged and updated about their orders, queries, promotional offers and discounts. Magento features a variety of pre-loaded basic email templates that you can modify as per your need.
The configuration for transactional email templates is designed to support multiple devices. You can upload your logo, select the header and footer templates for different stores, and enter the name of each CSS file that is needed to format the content of your transactional email messages.
Step 10. Monitor, Refine and Test
The latest but not least thing is to monitor your Magento store metrics using a reliable analytics package. Google Analytics is one of the most popular tools for helping shape your marketing decisions, refine your store features according to customer demands and text them to determine their impact on business sales.
Bonus: Tips To Further Enhance Your Magento Store
- Make sure your store is updated with the latest version of Magento to avoid bugs and performance issues. Infact, Magento informs you whenever the latest release is out by inboxing you.
- Domain name helps to target specific audience. For example, .com would work if you are selling your products globally. Similarly, .sg would work when you are selling your products only to Singapore audience.
- Rather than modifying core Magento theme too much, one must opt for a custom theme.
- Page loading time matters as that can affect your bounce rate. Use CDN so that images, CSS and various other elements load instantly.
- Organic traffic is the core area where eCommerce entrepreneur is focused on. Running a SEO audit is a must do activity as it helps with the crucial information like if your website is mobile optimized, relevant meta descriptions, total number of backlinks, etc.
- Use any suitable analytics tool like Google Analytics. Make sure you configure it correctly. This helps to check out what product is working the most for your eCommerce site, what are the demographics of people buying your product and so on.
- 180 days is the default period set by Magento to keep your logs. You can change it to a month or so to save up some space.
- SSL certificate encrypt all communication between the browser and the web server, ensuring that all data goes through a secure (HTTPS) connection. This certificate helps to gain your customer’s trust and also to rank higher on search engine.
