eBay’s two Magento products – Magento Go and ProStore have been scheduled to close down by early 2015. The decision left many merchants feel uncertain about their stores’ future although eBay allowed a 7-month time to select an alternative platform. Both the products are used by small-to-medium sized businesses who are not usually risk takers.
Of late, Magento Go was very inactive with no blogs, Facebook, or Twitter updates available. There were no new features, marketing pushes, or support updates. It seemed like it was virtually left to die a natural death! It is estimated that there are over 10,000 small-business customers will be affected by this shutdown. However, the breather offered by eBay is fair enough to migrate their store smoothly before the holiday shopping season kicks off. In fact, they have ample amount of time to find out a substitute.
Interestingly, now they are veering towards a positive campaign favoring Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition.
Mark Lavelle, SVP, Product and Strategy at eBay puts the whole idea this way: “two solutions that better support and better equip small and medium size merchants to prosper in the evolving and increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape.”
For relocation of an online store, the biggest concern should be SEO, because there have been a lot more work done already in that direction and switching will certainly affect it badly. Hence, as a damage control measure, Magento products are the best recommended!
Migration – The next significant step
Transition to a new store or eCommerce site demands many things to be done accurately. There is a huge product database which needs to be taken care of. Other than this, there should be a solid plan to redesign the entire site before the implementation starts. Also, there is a burden of watching out for other ecommerce website aspects like new shipping preferences, a new SSL certificate, hosting name, etc. In short, there should be skilled and experienced resources to handle the complete changeover process and implement it without any shortcomings.
The open source version, Magento Community Edition, is generally designed for medium sized merchants. On the other hand, the larger retailers wish to have more code flexibility with great customization power. This leads more acceptances towards Magento Enterprise Edition by large stores aiming to have bigger online fortunes! Additionally, the international support provided by Magento Enterprise edition is welcomed by ecommerce community.
Migration to Community and Enterprise Edition
Unquestionably, there are many options for the migration with several suggestions coming from reliable corners. However, for those who would like to have total benefits of Magento eCommerce features it is advisable to go ahead with Magento editions like Community or Enterprise which in fact would be a real help for the merchants as they can still be on a familiar platform. Moreover, eBay is offering their continued support during this transition period.
Transition to Community Edition
Switching to Community Edition can be a natural progression to ecommerce success. Needless to say, there is no room for any worries. Everything required for migrating to a new platform is quite possible with this remarkable open source content management system. Modifying the Magento core system is much more flexible with this edition.
Developers can implement the essential files and stretch out its functionality by utilizing appropriate plug-in modules. Additionally, the new gold rush in ecommerce known as “Responsive Design” is a feasible option if the merchants wish to adopt either of these platforms.
General Features
- Marketing, promotions, and conversion tools
- Site management, catalog browsing, checkout payment and shipping
- Product browsing, order management
- Customer accounts, customer service
- International support, mobile commerce
- Analytics and reporting
If the migration need is not limited to these above features, then there is the Enterprise edition which is a sure bet for all customization. This edition is much more enterprise oriented and has the ability to provide complete code flexibility which helps the larger store owners.
Additional Features offered by Enterprise Edition
- Rich merchandising suit
- Dynamic rule based product relations
- Scheduled import/export functionality
- Backup and rollback and merging/rollback of content
- Customer attribute management
- Category view and purchase permissions per customer group
- Order achieving, Solar search, full page caching
- Configurable order tracking widget
- Support for alternative media storage CDN and database
- PA-DSS certification/payment bridge
- Strong data encryption, hashing, and key management
Looking at these above features, one thing is clear that Magento is unbeatable when it comes to eCommerce and if a migration needs to be done, then it would be either Community edition or the Enterprise! As the holiday shopping season fast approaching, getting the migration done at the earliest would be a smart move. This decision is risk-free because clinging on to a sinking boat for long would not be a cool idea! Need to get on to a newer podium at the earliest which only can help the merchants to do justice to their customers!
