Starting an e-commerce project nowadays might feel pretty easy — but surviving on the market is much more difficult. Success is an effect of multiple factors, including the right marketing approach, focus on a specific niche, and… a reliable, amazingly performing technology behind your website.
One of the tech solutions that can guarantee your e-commerce site the scalability and reliability you need is Magento.
Why should you choose Magento for your e-commerce project?
Since its initial release in 2008, Magento has been one of the leading players on the market of e-commerce platforms. Although more than a decade has passed since its launch, Magento is still at the top of the rankings and shows amazing potential for the future — that’s why the company has been acquired in 2018 by Adobe themselves.
What makes Magento stand out in the field of e-commerce platforms? Why should you choose it to power up your next e-com project?
- Scalability
Magento is an amazing choice for small and huge e-commerce businesses alike. Thanks to multilingual version support and managing multiple stores using one system, you can start using Magento in your early days and keep doing so even when you reach hundreds of thousands of clients.
- Cybersecurity
Magento team closely looks into the cybersecurity measures that are needed to protect your and your customer’s data and makes sure to deliver top solutions on the market.
- SEO-friendliness
Thanks to built-in SEO features, Magento can help your business boost its presence on search engines — getting you more organic clients.
- Open-source
Even after the purchase by Adobe, Magento keeps being developed as an open-source project — this means you can use it completely free of charge.
- User-friendliness
The first layer of Magento’s UI is understandable even to non-developers, allowing your team to easily manage your online store.
Why hire Magento developers?
While Magento is indeed easy-to-use even for non-techies, the setup process and management of the tech side of the platform should be left to developers themselves. What benefits are there exactly waiting for you should you decide to hire Magento developers? They can…
- Install Magento on your server
- Analyze and optimize the back-end performance of your site
- Install new plugins/features to your web store
- If needed, create completely new plugins dedicated specifically to your business
- Build Magento themes/templates and implement the projects prepared by web designers
- Set up data analytics tools for your store
- Assure mobile responsiveness
- Provide fast troubleshooting
The hard skills that every Magento developers should have
To fulfill all the above tasks and bring your e-commerce business truly amazing results, a Magento developer should possess a set of specific hard, technical skills. Below we list the most important ones.
- Extensive experience with the Magento platform
Anyone can download Magento, install it on their server and play with it for a while — but this can hardly be called an experience that a professional Magento developer should have. When you hire Magento developers, make sure to review the portfolios of your candidates and see whether they have actually worked with the platform in a business environment before.
- Proficiency with front-end languages
Magento developers most often work on both the front-end (what the client sees) and back-end (operations on the server-side) of a website. To optimize the former, they need to have extensive experience with the three most important web languages — HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
- Knowledge of PHP
All back-end operations in Magento are done using PHP. Expert understanding of the language (in the context of this specific platform) is a must when it comes to custom Magento theme and plugin development.
- Experience with relevant frameworks and libraries
To expand the possibilities of Magento even further and speed up the development process, developers can utilize additional web frameworks and libraries. Magento itself makes use of some popular PHP tools like Symfony and Laminas, so previous experience with these is incredibly useful. Developers can also utilize other frameworks and libraries, such as React and Angular, to improve your web store even more.
- Experience with database management
In Magento, database management is handled using MySQL — knowledge of this technology is, therefore, crucial for your Magento developer.
Leveraging the potential of great soft skills
On one hand, soft skills simply highlight the work ethic of your candidate. On the other, they can highly impact how your whole team works — how well they cooperate and how innovative they are. To leverage this unique potential, hire Magento developers with the following soft skills.
- Researcher attitude
To always bring to the table unique, innovative solutions.
- Attention to details
To write reusable, bug-free code.
- Expert time management
To squeeze a few different tasks into one day.
Best Magento developer job interview questions
The best way to make sure that your candidate really has all the skills they claim to have is to run a full-scale technical job interview with them. Of course, such an interview must be run by a true expert in Magento and the technologies it uses (such as PHP). If you don’t have such expert knowledge yourself, consider asking for assistance from another Magento developer, a software consultant, or an IT project manager.
To give you an idea of the types of questions that can be asked during a job interview with a potential Magento developer, we provide a few top examples below.
- What is a CSS reset? How can it be useful for you?
- What modes are in Magento 2? How are they different from each other?
- What is minification?
- How do you implement validation in Magento 2?
- sessionStorage vs localStorage — what is the difference?
- What are escaping characters in PHP?
- $argv and $argc — what are the differences?
- How can you use HTTP Headers in PHP?
- What is multiple inheritance? Does PHP support it?
- How would you create a Singleton in PHP?
How to hire Magento developers who truly fit your business?
But before you make the final decision about hiring any of your candidates, consider also how well they fit your company. The more they match your unique company profile, the better the end results will be — and the faster you will see them coming.
Consider especially the two following areas of company fit…
- Industry fit
The power of e-commerce has been already leveraged by virtually every industry. From the most general marketplaces, like Amazon, to very niche stores visited by true enthusiasts —there is an online shop for everything. To make sure you approach your target customer in the best way possible, hire Magento developers with previous experience in your business vertical. The closer the match, the better for you, as such specialized developers will most likely already have the knowledge about your industries, what e-commerce solutions fit it best, and what technical obstacles you may encounter.
- Company culture fit
Just like soft skills, the company culture match will boost the overall cooperation and innovation level across your company. Consider the most important values of your business — think of areas like the preferred style of management, approach to remote work, focus on local/global. Then, hire Magento developers who also share these values.
Building an e-commerce dream team
With the tech side of your new e-commerce website taken care of by Magento developers, it’s time for you to consider how you can improve your customers’ experience in other areas. Hire web designers and UI/UX designers to draft for you the perfect template, start gathering the right data with the help of data scientists, or build the right product strategy by investing in a Product Owner.
Whichever expert you are currently looking for, Ideamotive can help you find them. We run the industry-leading network of IT talents and connect businesses with professionals exactly tailored to their needs. Whether you want to hire Magento developers, connect with business analysts, or power up your product with the help of machine learning engineers, we can find you the right people fast.
