You need the right platform to support your ecommerce business! Your decision is based on your market segment and the needs of your customers—plus you want to offer a better shopping experienced than your competitors.
To meet all these needs and more, Magento may be your platform of choice. After all, it’s a front-runner in the ecommerce business space and the top choice of many companies. This “big player” provides distinct advantages, but (as with anything) it also has its share of drawbacks, as well. You must consider both sides when making your final decision.
Today, in our Magento Commerce review, we will discuss the pros and cons of the platform. We will also provide a pricing comparison to other leading ecommerce technologies for 2019.
See Also: Magento Jobs
Magento Commerce: Advantages (Pros)
Consider the following list of pros you’ll gain with Magento:
Flexibility. As the main highlight provided by Magento Commerce, flexibility is certainly something to consider. Your team can modify Magento’s source code to build site features as needed by your business. This means you can customize templates, rather than relying on a few cookie cutter options. You can also build the functionality to meet the needs of your shoppers—creating a shopping experience exactly how you’d prefer it to be. Flexibility also translates to scalability, allowing your platform to grow and accommodate your needs as your business expands.
Comprehensive features. Where exactly do they end? The catalog of features available with Magento exceeds those of most other ecommerce technologies. As such, you can accommodate multiple locations, stores, languages, pricing, and currencies within your site. This means you can offer capabilities to shoppers such as pricing differentiation based on audience. You can also expand your market globally by making your site accessible to multiple languages and currencies.
A broad support community. The unexpected is always expected, and ours is not a perfect world. That’s why there’s tech support when your site (and your IT crew) needs help. Because Magento Commerce is a popular platform, it’s used by a large community, and this means endless resources to help you troubleshoot when things don’t quite go as planned.
Mobile capabilities. Let’s face it—much of the world runs on smartphones. The easier you make it for shoppers to access and use your site, the more sales you’ll close. Magento supports both web and mobile viewing, to increase access to your storefront.
Magento Commerce: Disadvantages (Cons)
Along with the above list of pros comes a list of limitations. These are also important to take into consideration:
Cost prohibitive. If you want one of the best, you must be willing to pay for the best. And Magento can be expensive, depending on the version you choose. If you’re a small business with a limited budget, pricing can be a hurdle. This is discussed in more detail below.
It takes time to master. The learning curve for Magento Commerce mastery is steep. As a result, it’s hard to find ecommerce developers who have extensive experience under their belts. This is due in part to the fact that it’s such a massive platform, and it takes a long time to learn. It also has to do with the wide range of users in the Pro-Magento community—weeding through and finding an expert is a tall order.
Multiple features = slow loading time. Magento’s capabilities result in the large amount of space it takes up. The platform’s flexibility is due to the data that comprises its complex architecture. This makes it time-consuming to work with, and even harder to transition from another platform to Magento. As such, it’s best as your initial and long-term ecommerce platform choice.
Hosting considerations. Magento should be hosted on its own dedicated server—and this requires your or someone on your team to understand how that server works. If you attempt to host other sites on the same server as Magento, the sheer size of this platform may cause performance issues. Make sure your server can accommodate.
Pricing comparison 2019
So, how much does Magento cost in 2019? As noted above, it’s one of the pricier choices for an ecommerce platform. But it’s also available in two editions: Magento Community and Magento Enterprise Edition. What’s the difference? The community is free to use; however, it includes no support. This means your staff must handle all customizations and design. To gain the functionality of Enterprise, you can purchase extensions, or in other words, upgrades.
Enterprise includes support to help you with your site design, building and maintenance needs. This edition starts at around $22,000 per year for the basic support package. Depending on the size of your business and your annual revenue, the pricing structure of Magento may be prohibitive or in line with your requirements.
Final thoughts on Magento Commerce
Regardless of the platform you choose, you will likely need the staff to make things happen—from developers to architects to project managers. Jarvis Cole can help. We’re leaders in Magento recruitment. We understand the ecommerce industry and will place you with the candidates you need to keep your platform, and your business, running strong. To learn more, contact us today!