There’s nothing quite like launching and managing a true enterprise eCommerce experience. From the very first day, you’re dealing with high traffic levels, an influx of customer and potential customer data, abandoned carts, customer support requests — and of course, a flood of orders that need to be processed.
It’s safe to say that in such a hectic digital environment, you don’t want to be relying on a flimsy eCommerce platform.
Magento (and more specifically, Magento Commerce) has proven to be a popular choice for enterprise eCommerce brands. According to Salmon, Magento accounts for 31.4 percent of top 100,000 eCommerce sites.
Magento opensource vs. Magento commerce
First things first, an enterprise needs to know the difference between Magento Commerce and Magento Opensource.
• Magento Opensource: Formerly known as Magento Community, Magento Opensource The free version of Magento that can be downloaded, customized, and self-hosted.
• Magento Commerce: Formerly, Magento Commerce came in two versions, Magento Enterprise and Magento Enterprise Cloud. Those two versions have been unified, leaving us with Magento Commerce, a premium version of Magento Opensource that includes cloud-hosting as part of the subscription fee.
The disadvantages of Magento as an enterprise eCommerce platform
In a hurry? Here are the 7 things you should consider before using Magento as an enterprise eCommerce platform1. Ongoing costs
Even though Magento Opensource does not require you to pay a minimum yearly fee of $22,000 a year, it does require you to undergo updates, development and integration from time to time. And those are just the upfront costs — you’ll also have to factor in the hidden costs of running an on-premise website.
Magento regularly rolls out patches and security updates which needs to be manually installed. And believe me, the manual installation process is not as straightforward as you like it to be. You’re better off getting support to help you manage and install the updates, but this would come at a cost. You would need to hire Magento specialists or refer to official Magento support, which does not come cheap.2. Needy technology
Do you want to manage technology, or use it? If you’re using Magento Commerce edition, you’ll find that it’s based on an old approach of “download and customize”. Not only does that take time, but it also takes technical knowledge — which again, may cost you a pretty penny if you want your eCommerce experience to be bespoke and enterprise-grade.
This approach from Magento also saps your attention and energy away from the activities that will help you scale your business. Instead, you will be forced to worry about managing the technology and running updates as and when required.3. The support sinkhole
Magento has 1,300 open and ongoing support tickets. So if you run into issues, you may be waiting in line for quite some time before you find a solution.
If you want to bypass official Magento support (which you’d be paying for handsomely) your ongoing support costs will rise even further, as independent Magento support specialists charge hefty fees.4. Magento is just an eCommerce solution — but that’s not enough for an enterprise
Here’s a vital point that’s often overlooked (before it’s too late, that is).
Magento is a stellar eCommerce platform, but that’s pretty much all it is. But in today’s eCommerce climate, to even stand a slim chance against the eCommerce giants like Amazon, you need so much more than just an eCommerce platform.5. Updates, migrations and headaches
Running Magento means you must undergo an endless cycle of updates. And as mentioned before, running these maintenance procedures is not a straightforward task. Plus, you would eventually have to migrate to the newest version of Magento, whenever they decide to roll that out. For example, currently, Magento 1 users are experiencing the pain of having to migrate to Magento 2.
Magento 1 users have to either migrate to Magento 2 or re platform completely, as it was announced that Magento would not be providing support for Magento 1 after June 2022(previously, it was November 2018, but this was extended).
As you can imagine, the migration process isn’t easy or cheap. Many developers who have migrated to Magento 2 have commented on the difficulty of the move, as many Magento 1 themes and extensions are incompatible with Magento 2.6. It’s open source
We’ve already had our say on the open source vs closed source debate, but let’s briefly revisit this issue.
As an open source platform, Magento gives users the ability to customize the code in any way they like. That may sound great at first, but when you consider issue #5 mentioned previously, having a highly-customized, bespoke back-end will make your life even more difficult when it comes to inevitably migration or re plat forming.7. Magento isn’t built for the IoT era
As more IoT devices emerge, online merchants have to ask themselves a critical question: how are we going to sell products and publish content on all these new channels?
The answer is through a headless commerce platform — which can heedlessly deliver products, content and other assets to Amazon Echoes, smart watches, digital signage and everywhere in between.
