As more and more bricks and mortar stores shift to the online sphere to reach a wider audience and maximise profits, there is a high demand for services which support their requirements.

In comes Magento.

Magento provides more features than other ecommerce platforms by offering a high degree of flexibility and functionality. It’s estimated 20 per cent of all ecommerce sites use Magento (that’s over 250 000 live merchants!). Big name brands such as Samsung, Coca-Cola and Nike all have chosen Magento to power their sites. As an open sourced PHP based platform, it is the perfect solution for medium to large scale businesses worldwide.

This year has proven extremely successful for Magento. Here are some trends we noticed merchants using in 2018:

• Mobile friendliness- Magento software is mobile friendly so users can make purchases instantly and hassle free

• More interactivity- customers want to feel their shopping experience is tailor made to them, e.g. collecting data about their shopping experience can then lead to offering them product recommendations, discounts or promotional codes. This personalisation allows customers to form trust with your store

• Negative space- Magento leans towards the clever use of negative (white) space. The customer can then comfortably interpret and comprehend what is presented on the web page

• Illustrations drawn over photos- this gives a personal and imaginative touch to your online store, creating a story in the customer’s mind and differentiates your brand from others

• Parallax scrolling- this type of scrolling uses computer graphics in which the background images move more slowly than in the foreground, creating depth and illusion. Your product inventory will become larger, allowing for improved storytelling and an impressive user experience

No doubt 2018 was a huge year for Magento. With its functionalities, tools and extensions helping to deliver the advancing needs of its merchants, it is clearly the ultimate in ecommerce platforms. Here at Rival we can’t wait to see what is waiting ahead for Magento in 2019!