E-commerce platform is a software application that allows business to develop an e-commerce web site with minimal effort. Among the e-commerce platform available Magento is most famous and widely used e-commerce platform due to its unique feature. The unique features and advantages of using magento  from other e-commerce platform are discussed below.

What is Magento?

Magento is an online hosted e-commerce platform for entrepreneurs and small business that allows you to create and build an online store to sell your products quickly and easily. The best thing about Magento is its point and click nature. Its allow you to build your website without having worry about things like software, servers or even website code.

Unique features of Magento

1. Scalable platform

The e-commerce platform offered by Magento is a scalable platform that can grow with your business, that is according to your business needs, you can customize the program.

Three flavors of Magento

Magenta offers three different e-commerce platform and each have its own unique characteristics

  • Magento enterprise edition

This edition is a high performance, scalable e commerce solution which offers flexibility to create a rich e commerce experience from desktop to mobile.

Enterprise version of Magento is loaded with more than hundred extensions that allow you to integrate your e-commerce application to other enterprise platforms.

  • Magento Go

It is a hosted e-commerce solution for small business which is having features like premium hosting. Flexible design, powerful marketing tools, Magento connects app, 24/7 support.

  • Community edition

This version is for developers to explore the flexibility of Magento platform and this edition is open source, free to download and of course have community based support.

2. More than thousand extensions

The Magento platform offers over thousand extensions that you can integrate into your e-commerce web site

Some of the extensions are listed below.

Social loginOne step checkoutGift card
SimicartStore LocatorInventory management
Giftwrap+Daily dealsSEO Plus

Visit http://www.magestore.com/magento-extensions.html , http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/ for the complete list of extensions provided by Magento

3. Magneto platform is owned by eBay Inc

In February 2011 eBay announced that it owns 49 % of Magento and in June 2011 they owned 100 %.

4. Expert help is provided with the assistance of experienced partners

Magento has 505  solution partners, 293 Industry partners, 16 hosting partners.

5. Private sales

If you wish to give some special offers or invitation to a particular group of customers (that is customer who used to purchase items from your website) you can do it with the help of private sale feature in Magento

6. Sophisticated content management system

WYSIWYG editor available in Magento will help you to build content rich and multiple versions of a page.

7. Staging of contents

Staging options will help you to create and test new versions of your site and catalogue.

8. Solr search

This search option helps to have an advance search than any other searching method.

9. Customer store credits

This feature helps you to assign store credits to customers and they can utilize it for special purposes.

10. Granular access control

This feature helps you to assign access level to each type of administrative user.

A video describing features of Magento is given below