Magento is one of the most popular, and the most robust, eCommerce platforms available at its price point. Just setting up a Magento store isn’t enough to start seeing sales, though. Read on to find out about ten ways to get the most out of this powerful platform.

Hire a Consultant

By far the easiest and most effective way to improve conversion rates using Magento is to hire a consultant who has dedicated experience working with this admittedly complex platform. Business owners who want to give their Magento stores an immediate boost can learn more about consulting at Sharp Commerce. Those interested in taking a more DIY approach can find tips that will help below.

Improve the Search Function

Magento may be a powerful eCommerce platform, but its built-in search function leaves much to be desired. It relies heavily on product names and metadata, while third-party solutions often facilitate errors and include self-learning features. It’s worth making an upgrade.

Personalize Product Recommendations

Magento doesn’t offer personalized product recommendations. Shop owners who want to improve conversion rates and generate extra revenue from existing customers should find a third-party product recommendation service.

Simplify Checkout

Magento’s built-in checkout process isn’t awful, but it has room for improvement. Look for a third-party checkout option that offers easy integration and more customization than the built-in version. It can substantially reduce cart abandonment and improve the overall checkout experience for customers.

Optimize Tags and Content

Search engine optimization (SEO) can also be problematic for merchants who sell on Magento since crawling and indexing of valueless pages can hurt rankings. Use robots.txt files, noindex directies, or parameter handling to prevent search engines from crawling things like layered navigation pages.

Improve User Experience

UX design is essential for any online store. Make sure customers can navigate the store easily by creating category pages for use in navigation instead of dynamic filter pages.

Automate Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the oldest tricks in the book when it comes to customer conversion, but it’s also one of the most effective. Automate email marketing, cart abandonment emails, and re-engage emails to reach out to more customers.

Get an Optimized Theme

Most business owners already use Magento templates, but getting a performance-optimized theme can help even more. It will increase search results, reduce issues with slow load times, and ensure a mobile-friendly shopping experience.

Clean the Database

Magento automatically creates logs in store owners’ databases and stores them for three months. This is a helpful feature, but if the database grows too much, it can slow down site performance. Store owners can either lower the storage time for the database or manually clean it out periodically to avoid site speed slowdowns.

Never Stop Merchandising

Merchandising is an essential part of running an eCommerce store. Although Magento Enterprise has a fairly effective built-in Visual Merchandiser, the Community Edition leaves much to be desired. Those who want to look into third-party options should look into enterprise-level solutions that cover different forms of merchandising.

The Bottom Line

Growing an eCommerce business is hard. Even with a powerful platform like Magento, store owners need to take the active initiative to improve customer experience and find the right third-party extensions and plug-ins. Hiring an eCommerce consultant is the best way for any business owner to get the most out of his or her Magento store.