eBay Drops Bombshell - Magento Go and ProStores Shuttering

If you are a Magento Go or ProStores merchant and looked in your admin panel today, you received a rude awakening: as of February 1, 2015, your store will be gone. It's up to you to organize a move to another platform before then.

For small merchants with few products and little customization, this is not a difficult task. It will still require some planning and effort, but, you should be able to take care of it relatively quickly. My biggest concern is for merchants with large catalogs (up to 100,000 products in ProStores), those who have invested heavily in design customization, and, merchants who use their store as a multi-channel hub for sales via eBay, Amazon or other channels.

From eBay's perspective, it was the right move. ProStores was a great platform 5 years ago, but, became technology constrained and was outflanked by Magento Community Edition on the upper end and Shopify and BigCommerce on the lower end. Shopify is famously easy to set up for starter stores and BigCommerce is a great choice for ProStores-type merchants and offers a more evolved, more updated platform.

eBay rightly chose to focus its investments in the best SMB options for merchants... Magento Community and Magento Enterprise. Mercifully, they are sunsetting the systems after the holiday rush, though, merchants with more complex stores will need to finish their migration planning and setup before the end of the holiday season if they are going to make the Feb 1st deadline (which, I believe, corresponds to eBay, Inc's fiscal year start).

Overall, I believe the move does right by merchants as well. If eBay did not intend to invest in the platforms, which they have been signalling for a while, then, well, it is best to push merchants to a better, more competitive platform rather than milking them for subscription fees for as long as they could, which was certainly an option. Of course, change will invite criticism and some merchants will be hurt. My company, Razoyo, has done work on Magento Go recently for several merchants. Today we know they should have invested that money in a migration to Magento Community Edition.

I've worked with eBay on many occasions over the past few years and, have to say that, overall, I find them to be a professional lot. They compete in a tough space and, often, have to make tough calls. The folks there are genuinely concerned about the effect decisions like this have on their customers; I'm sure there was heated internal discussion about this decision and have confidence they will do what they can to help merchants who are adversely affected. As the small-business counterweight to Amazon's corporate behemoth, they are forced to care, forced to be in the corner of the small guy. In my experience dealing with executives there, that is exactly how they see themselves.

In short, while I believe eBay makes mistakes (like X.commerce), they also seem to fail quickly and do their best not to take down those who believe in them. I think this decision is positive for them and for their merchants though it may cause a fair amount of short-term pain.

If you are interested in a more detailed discussion of practical considerations for merchants, please see my blog post.