Every industry has its own instruments, and, in the case of eсommerce, it is content. With the help of content, business owners can talk with customers, create and support a brand’s image, and increase its popularity. 

The logic is clear: when a company is popular, it has sales. So, it is crucial for web store owners to manage their content. Magento CMS is one of the best in this sphere and can give much more to its users. 

Let’s see in detail what is included in Magento. 

Is Magento a CMS?

A CMS implies the creation and publication of various kinds of content, for example, images, texts, videos, audio, and others for product description or company news. Magento includes much more than a CMS. With Magento, you can manage not only content but several interfaces, product listings, and customer data. You can process orders and set up your advertising actions. Simply put, Magento is a full-fledged ecommerce solution designed for all ecommerce needs.

Content management is crucial for both B2B and B2C companies. They need content to find and interest their clients. Despite having different content strategies, they use the same CMS features: a page constructor and several kinds of content.

It is not only about selling products but also about educating, inspiring, and informing. In this case, companies want to create blogs, user stories, lookbooks, and they just need to add new pages without coding, in the simplest way. This is the reason to turn to Magento with its great opportunities for content creation. 

Today we can use the Magento Commerce 2.3 version with its benefits, Magento has come a long way to provide its users with the most profitable ecommerce solution.

Magento Commerce early version

Before the release of the Magento Commerce 2.3 version, there were several limitations, and the platform’s CMS was more simple.

This Magento version provided the most popular pages in ecommerce: catalog and product pages, home, customer support, and such essentials as About Us, Privacy Policy, Enable Cookies, Service Unavailable, and 404 Not Found pages.

Magento had an interface that looked like Microsoft Word and the WYSIWYG editor that allowed users to create simple pages. If you wanted to experiment with more complicated pages and more interesting design, you could use HTML and CSS. 

Information in the WYSIWYG editor looked differently than on the published page. So, if you added a product listing, in the editor’s mode, you would see only product links.

If you haven’t upgraded to Magento 2.3, as a solution to this problem, you can use additional Magento tools. For example, it can be a visual content editor, like DragDrop, for creating pages in Magento or the Advanced Content Manager for making different kinds of content. It means that you should split the ecommerce and content management features and handle them differently. 

Magento updating can solve this problem and help merchants to conveniently manage their content and business. Magento’s new version provides bug fixing, new features, increased security and efficiency. 

Magento Commerce 2.3 version

Magento Commerce 2.3 improves the platform’s CMS features by adding a convenient drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor. For this, Magento brought the code of Bluefoot CMS & Page Builder plugin and added it to their latest version. You don’t need technical experience to work with the new Magento editor. You just choose a page layout and drag content blocks, headings, banners, or other elements and fill information. 

You can switch between page editing and previewing to create exactly what you want. What is more, Bluefoot is open-source, so you can turn to dedicated Magento specialists to extend its features.   

This Magento version also offers several OOTB capabilities, like templates for ecommerce pages.

If you take a look at the Magento Commerce 2.3 version as at a CMS, you’ll see a key drawback: you can’t create different types of content. 

Still, there is no need to integrate Magento with some CMS to solve this problem. You can just set up a special plugin. Choose a universal plugin that meets the requirements of all types of content or a plugin that deals with a certain content type, for example, a blog. 

There is always something to strive for, and hence the release of Magento Commerce 2.4 is planned for 2020. The updated version will provide a lot of improvements for tools and security to make a merchant’s life more simple and the work of a web store admin more convenient.  

The Magento Commerce full license price begins from $22K, and the total cost depends on the company revenue. Small companies can consider the free Magento Open Source version. 

Content management in alternative ecommerce platforms

Every ecommerce platform has its own features and ways of content management. It will be interesting to make a short review of the most popular ecommerce solutions to see the advantages of Magento Commerce.

SAP Hybris Commerce for enterprises uses SmartEdit to manage content. It is based on the drag-and-drop principle and allows its license owners to personalize and preview content. Its users can create targeted content and customer segmentation rules. For example, the company has a loyalty program and is going to launch discount campaigns for three different loyalty levels. Using SmartEdit, they can customize and show relevant banners to members of the first, second, and third target segments. 

The pricing of SAP Hybris Commerce depends on many factors, such as system complexity, business requirements, development model, etc.

Shopify is a popular choice of startups and small and midsize companies from the B2C segment. This platform provides an editor similar to Magento’s (though without the drag-and-drop feature). It is not so convenient for those who are used to creating content another way, but Shopify gives its users a built-in blogging engine. With this feature, merchants can work with the blog without any configuration or integration. 

Shopify presents three pricing plans with different functionality, so merchants can choose the plan that costs $29, $79, or $299 per month. 

All ecommerce platforms recognize the crucial role of content for business and offer various tools for content management. If you need help with choosing an ecommerce platform or customizing CMS, you can turn to our specialists in ecommerce development, and they will find the most suitable solution in your case.