Table of Contents
- What Are Magento Development Companies?
- What Do Magento Developers Do?
- What Are The Different Types Of Magento Companies?
- How Much Do Magento Development Companies Charge For Their Services?
- What Type Of Businesses Should Invest In Magento Website Development?
- 10 Questions To Ask Magento Developers
- Takeaways On Magento Development Companies
What Are Magento Development Companies?
Magento development companies build fully functional and high-performing online stores, using the open-source PHP framework Magento.
They work closely with Magento designers and leverage the platform to develop sites tailored to brands’ business growth objectives and visual aesthetics, ensuring an engaging user experience.
These companies build user-centric websites thanks to the many functionalities, features, integrations and customizations made available by the platform.
What Do Magento Developers Do?
The most reliable Magento developers work within larger digital agencies. So, they offer a variety of services that go beyond website design and development.
They commonly specialize in eCommerce marketing and can provide ongoing technical support to their clients.
Some of the most common service offerings include:
- Research and discovery: They learn about the clients’ needs and objectives. Then, they conduct market research to collect key info on their target audience, competition and channels. They scan existing websites to identify immediate pitfalls and evaluate your position. Additionally, they set practical goals and realistic deadlines.
- Strategy: Before these specialized companies get to work, they discuss the project in detail and develop a strategy that would work for the specific client or business. They touch upon best practices, innovative ideas and methods that cover various aspects, from design to development and marketing.
- Design: During the design process, these agencies produce engaging layouts and user interfaces that can help reduce cart abandonment and increase sales. They design with the brand’s visual identity in mind to ensure consistency.
- Development: These specialists use their technical skills to write code, customize third-party software, install plugins and more.
- Content migration: Many Magento companies can assist businesses with content migration from one platform to another, though this service usually comes at an additional cost.
- Hosting: Dedicated hosting is needed to fully support Magento sites, so they can usually help arrange web hosting services on behalf of their clients, including managed hosting if desired.
- QA testing and launch: Before and after these experts launch the final products, they perform quality assurance (QA) testing to ensure that all elements and features function properly. Finally, once everything runs smoothly, they can push websites live.
- Training: These agencies also specialize in training clients on how to run their eCommerce platforms in an effortless manner.
- Management and maintenance: These services may include but are not limited to search engine optimization (SEO), content writing, product data entry, social media marketing, PPC, version upgrades, security, backup, analytics and more.
Magento Open Source vs. Magento Commerce: What’s The Difference?
Magento Open Source is “a flexible, open-source commerce platform for developers and small businesses”. It is free to download, but unless you’re already an expert, it is definitely not free to develop.
As discussed earlier, hiring a Magento expert is important as non-technical people (and even developers without some experience) won’t be able to manage installation on their own.
You can find a handful of themes in the platform's Marketplace. Working with a theme will save time and money on the design since the website building process is much quicker.
However, your ability to personalize the look and feel of your online store will be restricted.
Magento Commerce, on the other hand, is the platform's hosted enterprise eCommerce solution and unlike Open Source, it is not free. Its clients have the support of the platform's own developers and the pricing starts at $1,988/month.
According to the platform:
“With Magento Commerce, you’re supported by a global ecosystem of merchants, partners and developers, who will bring your commerce vision to life.“
What Are The Different Types Of Magento Companies?
There are several different Magento website development certifications, so these experts can be categorized by the types of licenses they hold. The licenses are:
- Front End Developer Certification
- Solution Specialist Certification
- Back End Developer Certification
- Plus Certification
- Javascript Developer Certification
- Cloud Developer Certification
Additionally, we can categorize these developers by the types of clients they serve, from small businesses to large corporations, as these inform their cost and even the types of services they provide.
How Much Do Magento Development Companies Charge For Their Services?
Magento development companies typically price their projects on hourly rates and time estimates.
So, depending on various factors like company stature, team size and project complexity, the cost of their services will vary between $50 and $150 per hour.
Another possible pricing structure is the project-based fee. In this case, these specialized agencies undertake projects valued at $10,000-$25,000, sometimes even $50,000.
What Type Of Businesses Should Invest In Magento Website Development?
Magento is one of the most powerful eCommerce platforms in use today. It is packed with great eCommerce features and offers unbridled customization.
As such, it’s a preferred option for medium to large online stores. Its flexibility and powerful framework make it a good choice for businesses that know scalability is a key concern.
That said, Magento is also a highly sophisticated and complex platform that is not friendly for beginners hoping to install and manage it themselves.
A successful installation requires the help of an experienced dedicated developer. As with any service or product, you can expect to get what you pay for when hiring a professional company.
Trying to cut corners by hiring a cheap developer will cost you in the long run when things begin to break down because they were coded improperly, to begin with.
Hosting a Magento site can also get expensive, and dedicated hosting is usually necessary.
The expense of developing a Magento eCommerce store means that the platform is not especially well-suited for small businesses and those that are just testing the waters when it comes to eCommerce.
Small online stores will find more success (and better cost savings) with a platform like Shopify, BigCommerce or even WordPress with WooCommerce integration.
Custom Magento Development Specifics
Stats are useful, but what are the specifics that put them over the top?
Here’s why you should use Magento for eCommerce websites:
- Natural fit: While some other platforms, like WooCommerce, started out with a different purpose, Magento has been developed for eCommerce from the start. This highly specialized aspect of website development is bound to make a difference for your eCommerce website.
- Integration: Magento is easy to integrate with third parties. Also, having Google tools such as Google Checkout, Google Base and Google Analytics built-in from the start, greatly improves the eCommerce experience for your customers.
- Scalability: Some eCommerce platforms might have a problem handling products and orders once they start to scale up, but this one has no such issues. It was developed to tackle even the biggest of orders with ease, even thousands at a time. And if we are talking about an enterprise-sized business, there is always the Magento Enterprise Edition.
- Support: Whether you are a small-business owner, a web developer or an CEO of a big company, the platform's support team is always at your disposal.
- Community: Magento development companies are always willing to help each other out. So, whatever your question or issue may be, you can count on various users of the platform to assist you at any given point.
10 Questions To Ask Magento Developers
- Are you a full-service Magento website development company?
- Are you a Magento-certified partner?
- What types of Magento websites can you create?
- What features and functionalities can you implement in Magento?
- How will you secure our data and information?
- What processes and methodologies do you have in place when creating your websites?
- How will you create a timeline and keep our project on schedule?
- How often will we communicate and who will our point of contact be?
- Do you offer post-launch support and maintenance?
- How much do your services cost? How often will we be billed and how do you charge? Should we anticipate any additional fees?
Takeaways On Magento Development Companies
Magento development companies help brands like yours build high-performance online stores using the top-rated eCommerce platform.
The cost of their services approximately varies between $50 and $150 per hour.
You should partner with these developers to:
- Take advantage of their technical expertise
- Have a design that stands out
- Get technical support
To choose the best Magento developer for your business, make sure you take the following steps:
- Find out if they are a Magento solution partner
- Examine their portfolios and case studies
- Learn if they offer end-to-end services
- Understand their communication skills
- Ask for their pricing policies
Why People Trust DesignRush
DesignRush has a qualified team of industry experts and agency executives that focus on finding the best Magento development companies for your business. Our team determines the key performance indicators, like portfolio, client reviews, and industry reputation, that agencies must meet to be listed. To further leverage our agency expertise, businesses also reach out to DesignRush to streamline the process of finding the right agency via the Marketplace.
Sources
DesignRush sustains a directory of over 30,000 agencies categorized by service category, location, expertise and reviews. We build our database in two ways:
- Our dedicated team of agency experts actively search the web for top performing companies. We then pull information from their websites, online presence and client testimonials to verify their status and qualifications prior to listing.
- The agencies listed get notified of their profiles on the website and they can choose to claim it or not, which suggests their availability for more collaborations.
Agencies can also reach out to DesignRush and must go through the verification process prior to being listed.
About the Author
Maria Martin is a well-versed content writer covering digital products like websites and apps. She has dabbled in content management, content editing, and website management. Her penchant for turning complex topics into digestible information has helped businesses make better hiring decisions. For further inquiries, contact her at maria.m@designrush.com.
About the Editor
Juan Carlos Miguel Jalandoni is a certified Professional Scrum Product Owner™. A tech enthusiast with a solid commitment to accountability, he has excelled in product management for Asia's leading fashion eCommerce platform, Zalora. He is now using his expertise to improve DesignRush products. For further inquiries, reach out to carlos@designrush.com.
