Magento 1 End of Life...Where to Next?
Magento 1 End of Life: What You Need to Know
Things are moving quickly in the current global marketplace and e-commerce is no different. In order to provide a robust analysis of where to best direct our client base, it is important to break-down the viability of each and every e-commerce platform.
Magento 1 is a well-established open-source e-commerce platform with competitive features and developer tools that are fully customisable. Magento Commerce caters to three levels of business operations: small business, mid-market and enterprise, but has recently restricted growth due to its high price tag, set-up and operational hurdles. Since being acquired by Adobe in 2018 and subsequently releasing their newest version (Magento 2.x) their running issues have only solidified. As a result, we are seeing some businesses unwilling to foot the bill to migrate between versions. However, as of April of this year, Visa have warned e-commerce stores that fail to migrate to Magento 2.x risk exposing their businesses to skimmers and losing their PCI certification. As of May 2020 Magento 1 is still merchant supported, but retailers only have until June 2020 before the platform reaches end-of-life. While Magento 1 will still be viably operational, there is uncertainty around whether Magento 1 will retain merchant support, and where there’s no merchant to solve your security issues (i.e. no patch you just add-on) there’s additional work and risk management issues for individual businesses to solve - like acquiring PCI compliance. Combine this situation with the high costs of hosting, security, plugins, developers and, for enterprise, the licensing fee, it becomes prudent to do a quick comparison of Magento 2.x against other e-commerce offerings like BigCommerce or Shopify.
Magento Positives
Magento 2.x has a market advantage after merging with Adobe in 2018. Their strong reputation combined with their high performance when supporting large product catalogues has maintained their stake in 30% of all e-commerce stores. Magento provides support for MAP, Native Product Bundles and Grouped Products, other Native related products, unlimited attributes, along with their free Magento Community Edition and a heavily customisable platform. Their merchant fee covers hosting, security/PCI and plugins, while developer costs include set up, regular maintenance and security patching. However, this is where Magento’s strengths take a U-turn, when we consider that Magento Enterprise already charges a licensing fee that starts from around $18K per year and migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 will additionally cost between $20k-$40k to implement and design. You really need a developer or in-house team to maximise your store with Magento, which leads us to the Magento negatives and consideration of other e-platforms.
Other things to consider
Moving from Magento 1 to Magento 2.x requires remodelling the architecture and structure of your store. This means a big investment between $20k-$40k for implantation and design. While there are scripts to help, design cannot be transferred, and extensions need to be individually installed by a developer. Customisation incurs further set-up costs ranging from $40K-$100K while enterprise are looking at $100K-$120K to get started. It is reasonable therefore to ask whether such a developer/designer dependent platform is truly desirable in the long term. Considering the high set up costs and difficult onboarding process to launch a store, it feels like an oversight that Magento does not offer free themes or support for the Magento Community.
In contrast, competitor e-commerce platforms such as BigCommerce or Shopify offer a more streamlined approach, with standard pricing from $29.95 per month, plus stores at $79.95 per month, and pro offerings sitting around $249.95 per month. With a lower total cost of ownership and an extensive library of prebuilt integrations to enable unrestricted flexibility, the take away is that it may be time to open discussions on moving away from Magento platforms.
We at UBT Digital would only be happy to discuss your e-commerce platform options and make your business built for growth.
Contact [email protected] or phone +64 21 228 4297