SMBs, Magento is no longer out of your league

Magento Commerce, formerly known as Magento Enterprise, just moved within reach for smaller retailers with a new offering that they're calling 'Starter.' Magento Commerce Starter is simple. If you're doing less than $5 million in sales online each year, you can give up BI essentials, the upcoming B2B module, faster support response times, dedicated hardware, and Magento Cloud Launch Manager to save some money on licensing. I can't share specifics, but I'll say it's close to half what you would pay for Pro (the regular version of Magento Commerce). You also get only 99.9% service availability instead of 99.99% (if you know why that matters, let me know in the comments). To qualify, you can't store more than fifty thousand effective SKUs in the Magento database, a number you calculate like this:

• Number of SKUs+ Number of Complex Products
• multiplied by the number of store views
• multiplied by customer groups

You still get the same ecommerce features you get with the Pro version. I'm not legally allowed to say anything, but some new features coming soon in 2.2 make this even more compelling than it is today.

Of course, there are a few reasons why you won’t miss these features as much as a small business (and some expensive reasons why Magento is cutting them when they cut price)

• BI Essentials: This is Magento’s basic business intelligence tool that pulls in 25 standard reports into the Magento admin panel. For $100 a month, you can get this feature back (no other feature works a-la-carte like that).
• B2B module: processing B2B features like pricing and quoting eats up server power. When you elect for Starter you save them money on additional servers. As a small to medium sized business, you can handle wholesale transactions the old fashioned way. When the cost of those transactions exceeds 30K, it’s time to give Pro a look.
• Dedicated hardware: With the starter version, you’ve got roommates. Your production environment will share space on a server with other merchants. This could slow you down, but that’s not likely to be the case if you qualify for the Starter version.
• Support response times: With Starter, Magento takes twice as long to respond to your requests. At low volumes, you should experience less performance issues, and those issues (think downtime) have less impact on the country’s GDP if you know what I’m saying.
• Launch Manager: Today, with the Pro version, every merchant using Magento's Cloud is assigned a dedicated Launch Manager to ensure successful implementation and launch. While you may think sharing a Launch Manager with your 'roommate' wouldn't be so bad, it's really your partner who interacts with the Launch Managers. At Blue Acorn, we work directly with our clients' Launch Manager heavily at the project kick off (setting up the instance) and even more so about one month before launch. They also serve as a great resource if we come to any bumps in the road. For complicated implementations, this is a critical resource weeks before launch.

If you’re interested in learning more about Magento, you can contact us here.