Migrating from Magento Community to Magento Commerce Cloud can deliver significant benefits as part of your business development strategy.
You’ll want to be sure you choose the right ecommerce platform to replace Magento 1 Community Edition when it reaches the end of its operational life 30 June 2020. Here we review some key points you might want to think about.
Magento 1 Community Edition
The flexibility of Magento 1 made it a much-valued platform for ecommerce businesses around the world and there are still an estimated 180,000 sites using it. And, of course, the Community Edition (CE) is open source and free to download and use. However, Magento announced that Magento 1 would come to the end of its supported life on 30 June 2020.
If you currently use Magento 1 CE, you will know that it has excellent functionality for small and growing businesses without major configuration requirements and there are plenty of Magento extensions available.
However, without ongoing support, there won’t be new extensions, innovations or security updates and your site will become increasingly vulnerable to cyber-attacks.
Magento Commerce Cloud
The successor to Magento 1 was launched back in November 2015, known as Magento Commerce with on-premise and Cloud-based options. Today, Magento Commerce offers a managed and hosted platform as a service (PaaS) solution.
It has an advanced Cloud hosting infrastructure for development, staging, and live website production, enterprise-grade analytics, personalization and artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s optimized for larger, more complex business to consumer (B2C) and business to business (B2B) companies with large catalogs and a lot of online traffic. Powerful out-of-the-box functionality provides extensive scope for customization, and seamless third-party integration.
Features include corporate account management and customer support, company credit management, and tools for fast ordering and online requests for quote. The powerful page builder means content can be created, previewed, and scheduled by non-expert users with content staging controlled in the easy-to-use Admin panel.
Magento Commerce will continue to evolve and improve, giving business that makes the decision to use it as their new ecommerce platform a competitive advantage.
What Magento Commerce can do for your business
Security
Magento CE doesn’t provide credit card tokenization or secured payment bridges which are required by banks and payment card companies. As security is a necessity for modern ecommerce, robust site security requirements and payment card industry (PCI) compliance are essential.
Magento Commerce offers multiple secure payment gateways like PayPal, Braintree, and WorldPay and has a regular scanning process, external penetration testing and a host of other security measures.
Performance
The flexibility of Magento CE meant that it wasn’t always the easiest platform for non-expert users, and it hasn’t had the best reputation for performance.
Magento Commerce pages load 30% to 50% more quickly and add-to-cart server response times are 66% faster than Magento CE.
It is effective for sites with high volumes of traffic, can handle large product catalogs, and process up to 39% more orders per hour. It will be the preferred choice for businesses that need fast development and continuous deployment in a secure and scalable environment.
Scalability
The future requirements of your business will be a deciding factor when you’re reviewing the benefits of Magento Commerce. Magento CE’s reputation for scalability wasn’t strong; a challenge that needed to be resolved by the user.
For businesses that expect to expand significantly in the next few years, Magento Commerce will be a good choice because it’s designed to scale according to business needs.
Functionality
Both Magento CE and Magento Commerce have powerful ecommerce functions including customer segmentation, the popular solr search platform, and return merchandise authorization (RMA) functions, for example.
Magento Commerce also offers opt-ins for promotions, enhanced B2B catalog functions, pre-built integration with enterprise content management systems and a progressive web applications (PWA) studio for more engaging mobile experiences.
Marketing
Magento CE gives you tools to boost your store’s search engine optimization (SEO) like customizing meta tags, headings, and URLs.
Magento Commerce can give you more advanced marketing features like content staging, sophisticated attribute-based customer segmentation, targeted content, and abandoned cart reminder emails.
Your choice?
For new businesses that wanted to explore Magento’s features Magento CE was a practical choice. However, ecommerce has come a long way since it was originally created in 2007.
Magento Commerce delivers a smoother, faster shopping experience and improved performance. In summary, it includes:
- improved performance and scalability
- advanced customization
- monitoring and cybercrime protection
- development tools
- streamlined integration with third party systems
- advanced marketing and segmentation
- large catalogs
- fast checkout
- a wide range of extensions
- advanced reporting.
As a managed, automated hosting platform, Magento Commerce delivers the optimum scalable and secure environment to meet the needs of fast-growing businesses.
How much does migration to Magento Commerce cost?
Migration requires more than a simple upgrade, so summarizing the cost of moving from Magento CE and Magento Commerce isn’t simple.
Magento CE wasn’t ever completely free because there were always costs associated with building, running and maintaining your site. You probably needed the help of someone with experience of developing and maintaining a Magento site and hosting costs must also be included.
So, it isn’t as straightforward as looking at the license costs for Magento Commerce, which bundles together licensing and Amazon Web Services (AWS) managed hosting. These prices start from as little as $40,000 per year, rising to $190,000, based on expected annual gross sales revenue.
Other considerations
When you move to a new ecommerce platform you will be changing database structures, and themes and working with a new application programming interface (API). To avoid data loss and downtime you will need the help of someone experienced in the migration process.
They will be able to help you review your current extensions and data and understand what functionality is now included in the core code for Magento Commerce. In many cases, you won’t need as many customizations and you will probably also be able to remove quite a lot of redundant data. This will simplify your migration and provide cost savings.
Migration also involves designing, building and testing your new platform before moving over your customer information, catalogs, orders, and shipment information While there are tools to help with this, customized data, administration rights, and media might all need to be moved manually and your migrated data will need to be thoroughly tested.
Hourly rates for an experienced Magento development and migration expert can range from £75 to £150 per hour. You will also need to think about any extensions or customized themes you might need.
We are currently offering our Magento Fast Track offer to get you trading online quickly with prices for development starting from £18,750.
In safe hands
Williams Commerce is an Adobe Gold Partner and specialist ecommerce system integrator providing ecommerce, marketing and technology services to a wide range of B2B and midmarket retail customers worldwide.
If you are interested in migrating from Magento Community to Magento Commerce, you will be in safe hands with our Magento experts. Please get in touch to find out more.
