Top 10 Challenges of Building Enterprise e-Commerce on Magento

An attractive, intuitive web storefront and an engaging online presence can make all the difference between brisk or sluggish sales for an eCommerce website. When customers gain a personalized shopping experience, one-click checkout, and other benefits of an engaging shopping experience, sales and profits improve. So, every expense and effort going into the development, hosting, and deploying of such sites become worthwhile.

With more than 100,000 online stores created on Magento, the open-source platform has emerged as one of the most preferred e-commerce platforms to set up highly customized and unique online shops. Magento is written using the PHP programming language and leverages elements of the Zend framework and the model-view-controller architecture. Developers can implement and extend the platform’s functionality by adding new plug-in modules available from third parties.

Why is Magento a Popular Choice for an eCommerce Site?

Easy deployment, integration capabilities, advanced customization, numerous layouts, plug-ins, and choice of hosting options are some of the advantages that helped it become a chosen platform for eCommerce developers. The platform has powerful marketing, search engine optimization, and catalog-management tools. It is PA-DSS and PCI compliant, cloud-optimized, and mobile-friendly.

The platform caters to the needs of small businesses, mid-market organizations, and large enterprises. With a choice between the free Magento open-source and cloud-optimized Magento Commerce with a license fee, the platform holds a large share of the eCommerce pie.

The Challenges

Many challenges have cropped up over the years with this open-source platform. Updates, patches, and advanced versions from the diligent development team have addressed these issues successfully.

Let’s look at some of the top challenges and how they’ve been addressed.

Speed

Speed is of paramount importance in eCommerce. Slow page loading and broken links can make or break a sale or a merchant’s credibility, with most first-time customers not returning to the site at all. eCommerce sites built using Magento’s open-source platform usually load faster but have often faced roadblocks due to speed issues. The presence of a large number of files affects the website’s speed.

Increased page loading speed, catalog page viewing capacity, faster order processing, and faster checkouts were features delivered by Magento 2. For low speed, the mitigation efforts include configuring a cache, updating to the latest version, and discarding redundant extensions, among other improvements.

Products Not Getting Displayed Correctly in the Frontend

When products were not visible in their native category, they were usually out of stock or the caches and indexes were out of date. These issues were widespread with Magento 1.

One resolution was to change the inventory configuration for displaying products that were out of stock. The experts suggested reindexing, index: reset, cache, and enabling the “All store views” version.

Lack of Documentation

Open-source platforms suffer from patchy documentation. The resources and reading material for Magento are scattered across many Internet sites, making it hard for developers to find source codes, resolutions, and training resources. The project timelines and costs go out of step due to this challenge.

Magento provides support services as and when developers raise a request. But the time spent is unnecessary, and Magento’s response is usually slow. In contrast, this issue is mitigated by the communities on the web that provides quick support and resolutions.

Low SEO Capability

Coming up in searches and being in the top rankings are crucial to making an online shopping site successful. Although Magento comes up in basic searches, it is wanting on many SEO parameters.

SEO has considerably improved in Magento 2 version. But it is still a good idea to implement additional SEO best practices, make your site fast and functional, and invest in content marketing to increase organic and inorganic growth.

Upgrade Issues

With advanced features and capabilities such as security updates, bug fixes, third-party updates, and integrations, businesses eventually have to upgrade to the latest version of Magento. Still, the upgrade itself is not free of challenges. Enterprises often encounter performance issues and even breakdowns while updating. There have been instances of loss of data due to migrations to the new Magento version.

At the beginning of the upgrade, a well-laid strategy and an experienced solution provider are required. A reliable technology partner can help you gain tangible benefits: improved performance, better testing framework, and high quality of code.

Dependency on Experts for Installation and Customization

Magento’s free code is relatively easy to deploy and customize. As a website owner, one is responsible for the necessary maintenance, keeping the code updated, keeping up with essential security patches, and migrating to the new version on time. Still, more advanced implementations could throw up errors after deployment or stop the development work altogether, until a Magento specialist evaluates and fixes the problem.

The Magento developer community has grown over the years, but free resources can only solve some problems. For custom code, better UI/UX, building customized extensions, and upgrading hassle-free, certified Magento developers and an experienced team can mitigate risks, prevent data losses, and minimize downtime.

Installation and Configuration Issues

The installation process has many issues, as it gets stuck, and errors of files and extensions crop up. Incorrect configuration settings could weaken the site’s performance.

Migration to the latest version would be required, besides changes to settings and code. There are solutions such as fixes, codes, and commands to each of these issues distributed across various websites, blogs, and social media posts.

Admin Issues

The Magento 2 version resolved the problems with multiple admins, blank admin page error, and slow admin logins, but new issues kept cropping up. The inability to login to the admin panel after incorrect login entries was because most browsers allow only real domains to collect cookies.

The solution was to write a few lines of code into the Magento file to fix this issue.

Extension Issues

There are challenges to adopting newer extensions that are often costly and take time to install. There could be errors when installing Magento extensions, and the installed extensions do not display at the frontend.

This issue can be resolved by relocating the files and deleting the cache. Ensuring extensions .phtml, .xml, and .css files are in their exact locations achieves these goals.

Data and Security Issues

Data does not mean only the customer’s financial information but also the website’s code and customer base. In October 2021, the Magecart cyber gang targeted two dozen unpatched vulnerabilities in third-party Magento plug-ins. They used different strategies, including exploiting the extensions’ Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) vulnerabilities to breach various stores. Many such cyberattacks have occurred because of failing to apply the latest security patches and not upgrading to the latest version.

The new security features in Magento 2 version help prevent data loss but are not foolproof, as is the case with any other security feature. Yet, upgrading to the latest version has security benefits.

Conclusion

Magento has a global community of implementation partners, specialists, and developers that help enterprises and individuals build and optimize their valuable eCommerce store that generates large volumes of customers and sales.

TechBlocks-a leading digital product development firm with its extensive experience, strong execution discipline, and “customer first” attitude-will be a valuable partner in your journey to build and launch your successful eCommerce store.

Originally published at https://www.tblocks.com on November 17, 2021.