A powerful open source ecommerce platform that offers the flexibility needed to scale with your business, it’s no surprise that Magento is the first choice for ecommerce retailers all over the world. With Magento 2 now offering additional features and an enhanced experience, there are even more reasons to make it your platform of choice.
A leading open source platform
There are plenty benefits to choosing an open source platform. Open to developers all over the world and continually evolving, there are often hundreds of people working to find and fix bugs and improve the platform. Subsequently, open source software often offers better quality and security. It can also be modified and adapted to suit your business, leaving you free from the vendor and able to create a custom solution.
Today, Magento is the leading ecommerce platform according to the Alexa top one million.
So, what makes Magento different?
While there are many benefits to these types of platforms, they are often developer focused and difficult for merchants to understand and maintain. Many fail to consider the customer with features that make sense to developers but not to marketers, and customisation usually requires specialist skills. Despite some being free to download, open source platforms can accrue plenty of build and maintenance costs.
In comparison, Magento is widely considered a more user-friendly alternative. The built-in features are customer focused, making the platform better equipped to deliver a quality shopping experience that drives engagement and conversion. This is especially true with Magento 2 which has been redesigned to offer an end-user type interface and even more marketing features.
Additionally, your store can be improved with any of the thousands of extensions built by developers. Where other ecommerce platforms often suffer from the complexities involved in customising the code, Magento makes it easy to create a custom ecommerce experience to suit your current and future needs. Plus, when it does get difficult you can always tap into the wide Magento community for support and advice.
The perfect fit
As well as the free Community Editions for both Magento 1 and 2, there are also the advanced Enterprise Editions which offer additional features and performance specifications for a yearly licensing fee. The right Magento fit for you will depend on your current and future business needs. While our Community packages offer a quick and affordable way to set up your ecommerce store, choosing the latest from Magento 2 promises an unparalleled experience and larger businesses simply can’t beat the benefits of Enterprise.
Community Editions
Free to download and install, Magento Community Edition has become one of the most popular ecommerce solutions out there. Despite its attractive price tag, this edition doesn’t cut corners on quality. In fact, the platform delivers all the performance needed to get your ecommerce store off the ground, plus additional features that go above and beyond other free platforms.
With a range of off the shelf themes available it’s quick and easy to set-up a store, plus easy API integrations make connecting to your other software now and in the future simple. Our CE packages are designed to take advantage of this simplicity and get your ecommerce store up and running in as little as 30 days.
From B2B to B2C, there is a wide range of different setups available that most other comparable platforms simply don’t offer. With multiple stores and multiple store views coming as an out of the box feature, virtually any ecommerce experience is achievable. Set up a separate wholesale site, different branded sites or show the same site in different languages and currencies.
Magento CE is also designed to convert with inbuilt marketing features to optimise the shopping experience. This includes the ability to set up upsells, cross-sells and related products on product and checkout pages to boost AOV, plus easy set up with popular payment and shipping methods can better equip your store to meet customer demands. Combined with the thousands of extensions available in the Marketplace, your ecommerce set up can be tailored to engage your customers.
Our Magento CE packages start from just £7,995 and can have you up and running in as a little as a month.
Magento 2 Open Source
The latest Community Edition from Magento 2 comes in the form of Open Source with development costs starting at £14,995.
So why the price difference?
While the costs are certainly more we think the upgrade is worth every penny. Released in November 2015, Magento stripped down the platform and rebuilt from the ground up to create a completely different beast. Still offering all the benefits of the free open source solution we all know and love, Magento 2 features a completely new architecture optimised for speed and performance.
Faster page loading across home, category and product pages is the main but by no means only benefit to be gained from the upgrade. The admin has been overhauled to deliver an even more user-friendly experience that’s easy to navigate and use, from setting up products and categories to delving into reports. The new visual merchandiser takes this a step further, allowing merchants to drag and drop products and quickly create category pages that are designed to engage and convert.
You’ll also find plenty of fancy features that now come out of the box and are designed with the customer in mind. This includes Elastic Search to connect your customers to your products more efficiently, and a streamlined checkout for frictionless conversion. Integrated with leading payment gateways like PayPal and Braintree, turning visitors into customers has never been easier.
Enterprise Editions
For medium and large businesses looking for a platform to meet the need of high sales volumes and bigger catalogues, Enterprise Edition is the way forward. Magento EE comes with a yearly licensing fee that includes additional support as well as a whole host of advanced features. You can call one of our team today to discuss the total costs of Enterprise for your business.
The most significant difference is the performance with up to 80% faster catalog re-indexing speeds compared to CE, making it better equipped to handle larger catalogs. Full page caching also means faster page loading, a must have for anyone dealing with higher traffic volumes.
Most of the functionality from CE that separates Magento from other ecommerce platforms is improved on in the paid version, and additional features that could only be achieve with extensions now come out of the box. A faster checkout process is complemented with a PCI compliant payment bridge, and related product features can be automated by categories instead of manually set up. For catalogs containing thousands of products this is an essential improvement.
The other in-built marketing features is where Enterprise really sets itself apart. Merchants can add customer attributes outside of the default offered in CE and create unique customer segments. These customer groups can then be targeted with dynamic banners, pricing and other promotions that are designed to convert. When it comes to customer retention, choose from a range of customer loyalty features including reward points, in-store credits, gift registry and cards, and even bulk ordering.
Magento 2 Commerce
The new Enterprise offering from Magento 2 is now called Magento Commerce. This combines all the superior functionality of Magento EE with the new and improved performance of Magento 2. The total costs will vary depending on the revenue, so contact one of our team today to discuss your Magento Commerce solution.
While previously merchants sought to achieve an Enterprise level store with extensions, the gap between Open Source and Commerce has widened. More out of the box features included in Magento OS should help to avoid the complex and clunky stores that resulted from extension overload, and completely custom Enterprise grade features are now addressed solely in Magento Commerce.
Magento 2 has had two years to settle in, which means updates and improvements are still being release all the time. The latest Magento 2.2 update will see merchants take advantage of new bundled extensions. This includes Magento Social to show and sell products from your social channels, and Magento Shipping to connect your store to a huge database of couriers and shipping options.
The latest update also saw the introduction of all new Magento B2B. Designed to cater to the B2B customer, merchants can utilise a range of unique features including client account management, quick ordering by SKU ad CSV upload, requisition lists for reordering and quote generation with custom pricing to name just a few of the benefits. Deliver a completely personalised experience to each business client and focus on improving the metrics that matter to you.
Magento Cloud
Last year Magento topped off their offering with self-hosted Magento Cloud. It offers a ready-to-go environment and storefront featuring all the benefits of Magento Commerce with optimised hosting on Magento’s superior architecture. The solution is fully supported and includes an unrivalled technology stack thanks to some seriously great partnerships.
From cloud infrastructure by Amazon Web Services to super secure CDN with Fastly, the Cloud Edition is perfect for merchants who want to deliver the ultimate ecommerce experience and like everything they need in one place. For medium and large retailers, this solution can simplify vendor management and achieve a secure and scalable storefront that is ready to go.
Making the choice
Choosing between Magento 1 and 2, or Community and Enterprise Editions simply comes down to your business needs. Each one provides some level of scalability and can be customised to create truly innovative ecommerce experiences, but merchants taking a higher volume of sales or with larger product catalogs will undoubtedly benefit from the advanced functionality of Enterprise. Equally, while Magento 1 will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future, for many it will make sense to opt for the superior performance offered by Magento 2.
If you’re still not sure about any of the options on offer or simply want to know more about how Magento could help you achieve a superior ecommerce experience, contact one of our team today.
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