Magento is the #1 eCommerce platform in the world. Consider this: in 2018 $155 Billion in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) was sold online via the Magento platform.
Prior to GoldenComm becoming a Magento Business Solution partner, we have helped Magento shop owners to build, optimize, and drive results from their Magento stores. We have been supporting the platform since its early days, witnessing their tremendous growth and continued development.
In 2017, along with their all new Magento 2 release, Magento rebranded their products. Magento’s “Community” edition is now Magento Open Source. Magento Enterprise is now Magento Commerce
If your business is poised for growth and you’re contemplating Magento Open Source vs Magento Commerce here is a high-level comparison.
Magento Open Source:
This is the free edition providing all the basic features to run an eCommerce store. It has a modern Magento 2 tech stack that is scalable, supports payment integrations, and supports a host of extensions in the Magento marketplace. Open Source supports product import, responsive layout, a customizable dashboard, improved checkout and supports both registered and guest checkout options.
Magento Commerce:
This is a huge improvement from the Magento 1 Enterprise solution. It comes in two versions:
Cloud – where Magento hosts the software. Think of it as platform as a service. Never worry about maintaining versions and security updates.
It also is offered as an on-premise solution- similar to options in the past where online merchants would be responsible for hosting Magento Commerce. Commerce core features include elastic search and diagnostic tools.
A huge improvement includes refined performance which is especially important for larger stores and international support. Full page caching and clustered database support will ensure high performance for fast growing stores.
The new marketing features in Magento Commerce are a dream come true for online merchants. With content staging, content scheduling, customer segmentation, abandoned cart support and rewards program. Magento Commerce makes it a whole lot easier to manage.
Customer experiences can also be enhanced with Commerce supporting customer-initiated returns, gift wrapping, wish lists & gift registry, gift cards, and online store credits. Another key feature set that comes out of the box for Commerce is its B2B features. Any online retailer looking to facilitate purchasing for business customers should take a close look at business to business capabilities.
Magento Commerce Benefits
Cloud Hosting Option
eCommerce platform as a service running on the AWS hosting environment that includes CDN, monitoring tools, scalable database architecture. Software maintenance and patches managed by Magento.
Personalization
Experienced eCommerce managers know the importance of building personalized user experiences to improve conversions. With Commerce, you can display dynamically generated content, while running sales promotions and unique pricing for different segmented customer types or customer attributes such as:
- Age
- Gender
- Location
- Order History
- Previous Order Amounts
- And more.
Guest shoppers can also have personalized content and promotions.
Drag and Drop Merchandising
This feature in Magento Commerce blew us away. With a simple drag of a mouse, and admin can use Magento’s Visual Merchandise to set up your product pages like never before. You can organize your product category pages based upon various data sets or attributes like colors, old vs new products, highest selling items, size of items etc.
B2B eCommerce
This is a key selling point with Magento Commerce especially if there is a desire to sell to businesses online. With Magento Commerce B2B features are included out of the box. B2B features include company account set up, customer based pricing rules, multiple buyers per account, B2B buyer roles, contract terms support, payment terms by business customer, order forms, quote request workflow and the beloved reorder features. With the multi store set up with Magento Commerce you can run multiple stores B2C, B2B, microsites all through the same instance.
Instant Purchase
Amazon had a lock on this feature until recently. Magento Commerce includes the ability to select Instant Purchase to allow registered users to skip the checkout process entirely to buy items quickly and easily.
Site Search
Elasticsearch comes with Magento Commerce. Managing search to ensure a good user experience is a tough challenge especially with large store owners. Elasticsearch comes out of the box and includes features to manage misspellings, applying various weights to different attributes, and synonyms. Users want relevant search results.
Content Scheduling
This feature is like adding a marketing calendar to your Magento Admin. Its content staging features let you create multiple sets of content changes. You can preview them and schedule them to match up to your marketing schedule. With this you can automatically deploy new content and promotions.
Magento Tech Support
When you purchase Magento Commerce, Magneto provides an add layer of direct support. They offer 24X7 customer service to help with tech support and answer questions. This offers and added layer of support in addition to GoldenComm project management support (for GoldenComm clients).
In summary, Magento Open Source is a fully capable eCommerce solution often requiring the purchase and maintenance of various extensions or 3rd party plug ins to tailor the system to meet your needs. Magento Commerce provides a much more robust and highly scalable version that has a Cloud option for ease of maintenance. Its content and marketing features are very impressive as is it included B2B features. Run your direct to consumer store and your B2B store from the same platform. If significant growth is part of your future, and if you want to compete with the best, you may want to go the Magento Commerce route. Either way, you can’t go wrong with Magento.