Magento Enterprise is a well-established, perhaps even a veteran shopping cart system which has had a recent ‘upgrade’ with cloud features that have led to a relaunch as Magento Enterprise Cloud. What does the upgrade mean for Magento customers and how does Magento Enterprise compare to other e-commerce solutions such as Shopping Cart Elite?
Old school e-commerce from Magento Enterprise
There’s no doubt that Magento is one of the best known ecommerce systems and the reasons for its name recognition aren’t difficult to understand; established in 2007 the three tier Magento offering is one of the oldest e-commerce shopping cart solutions on the market. Like several other systems that were early into the marketplace, Magento Enterprise relies on name recognition to gain business, but the savvy online merchant won’t be fooled by history and will instead look carefully at the offering to ensure that it meets the needs of omnichannel marketing.
Magento Enterprise - be aware of the add-on costs
What does this mean in practice? For some customers it means that there’s a frustration about the patchwork nature of working with Magento. For example, Magento Enterprise isn’t hosted by Magento. That might be expected for the lowest tier of the offering, Magento Community, but when supplying an e-commerce solution for enterprises that fit in the mid to large range, most merchants would expect hosting as standard. Not with Magento Enterprise: you have to pay extra for hosting and also have the headache of finding a hosting plan that will work with Magento without integration problems.
Another bit of bad news for potential Magento Enterprise customers is that there’s no in-built blog. Quite a surprise for multichannel merchants who know that a blog is an integral tool both for customer satisfaction and for SEO. Yet again, Magento customers find themselves seeking a compatible add on, paying extra for a service that new generation e-commerce solutions offer as an integrated function, and then face all the difficulties of engaging with two sets of customer service agents - those from Magento and those from their blog, to overcome integration problems.
Shockingly, Magento Enterprise lacks an abandoned cart feature. No online merchant can afford to ignore the reality of abandoned carts and yet it’s still necessary for Magento customers to buy an add-on to deal with this essential fact of online business life.
Magento’s marketplace mastery - how good is it?
It’s a good time to step back and look at a little history. The story of the ill-fated Magento Go should be required reading for omnichannel merchants seeking to find the right ecommerce system for their growing business. When in 2011, eBay purchased a controlling stake in Magento, one of the first things that happened was the closure of Magento Go, a system that had been suffering from underinvestment for years. There were three main reasons that Magento couldn’t make a go of Go:
- Failure to adhere to open source - although it was claimed to be an open source based system, much of the Go back office wasn’t easily accessible or even understandable.
- Under-investment - Magento couldn’t keep their eye on the ball and as a result, customers felt under-serviced.
- Misunderstanding of software as a service (SAAS) - this is a crucial concern that should cause potential Magento customers to think twice. The original (and rather creaky) Magento software was product led, but the SAAS version constrained merchants so tightly their businesses couldn’t grow or even adapt to new omnichannel opportunities.
What has this to do with Magento Enterprise or even Magento Enterprise Cloud? Quite a lot.
Legacy systems can impede omnichannel commerce
Adding bits on to well-established, perhaps even elderly, e-commerce systems doesn’t usually work. The main problems experienced by merchants trying to implement older ecommcerce solutions include:
- Integration issues - the story of Magento Go shows what happens when you try to add bits onto an already existing system that was never designed to accommodate such additions. Simply put, it’s not pretty.
- Patching and upgrades - the bugbear of many online merchants is that when a patch or upgrade is applied to one area of an older system, it can have knock-on effects for other areas … as a result a pacth of the patch is often needed, leading to an endless proliferation of fixes to fix the last fix
- Slow loading times - already a problem for Magento, whose slow page times are subject to negative review even on their own community forums.
Shopping Cart Elite - designed with omni-channel in mind
Turning our attention to a much newer e-commerce solution, one designed since omnichannel marketing became an everyday reality, we can explore what a truly modern system looks like:
- Stellar load speeds - because the creators of Shopping Cart Elite (SCE) know that speed is essential to customer capture they focused on a page load speed of two seconds max. No more click-aways because customers lose patience waiting for elements to appear onscreen. No more abandoned carts because encrypted pages take forever to load.
- Shopper analysis - unlike Magento which lacks even an abandoned cart feature. SCE contains whole suite of tracking and analytics called Threat Engagement Analytics (TEA) which give vendors the power to explore visitor keyboard clicks to their site, permitting complete analysis of every aspect of shopping behaviour - and it’s free!
- Excellent functionality - Magento Enterprise receives a mere C- for documentation of functionality and processes at CPC Strategy, an independent reviewer of e-commerce platforms. By contrast, Shopping Cart Elite has an unparalleled range of function and complete and easy to use documentation. In addition SCE has fingertip control of reporting systems, allowing users to explore data in any number of configurations so they can interrogate information about their e-commerce site, and its customers, in ways that really work for them.
- Automation as standard - SCE software is specifically designed to handle complex selling; in other words, it aims to remain ahead of the customer curve so that merchants can automate most day-to-day operations, reducing the overhead on running an online business and allowing vendor focus on the high-level operations that maximise profit. What this means in practice is that anything from inventory updates to repricing against competitors can be automated.
- SEO from the ground up - if there’s one thing that causes merchant headaches when it comes to omnichannel, it’s SEO. Optimising search engine ranking is an ongoing process, one which successful vendors focus on as essential. But maximising SEO can be tricky if your e-commerce solution doesn’t harmonise SEO in one area, such as your blog, with other elements of your site. Shopping Cart Elite offers as standard features that Google loves, such as automated sitemaps, metadata, and rich snippets to ensure that every aspect of your site feeds your ranking.
Choosing the right omnichannel solution
Fast moving environments require a clear focus on solutions - few older e-commerce systems can adequately handle the demands of today’s omni-channel environment without requiring a plethora of add-ons, apps and patches. Working with an ecommerce platform designed for omnichannel marketing ensures that merchants are able to put their energy where it matters: in fine-tuning the details of their site to provide superb customer experience. Interrogating sales teams to find out which ecommerce platform will best meet a merchant’s needs is a fairly pointless exercise because the very nature of a sales team is to market their own product, regardless of whether it’s the best around. Independent reviews and comparisons go a long way to helping vendors explore solutions, and customer comments can be an invaluable way to discover what it’s really like to use an e-commerce system in practice.
Summing up our two potential solutions: Magento Enterprise has undergone a series of evolutions to adjust to omnichannel. For merchants who have enough money to throw at the problem and are skilled enough to identify and integrate the necessary add-ons to make Magento Enterprise/Magento Enterprise Cloud work, it may be a viable solution. On the other hand, Shopping Cart Elite offers a complete system designed to work with omni-channel vending, including all the elements of successful online sales which Magento Enterprise leaves out. The answer seems clear enough … SCE meets merchant needs without extra cost, fuss or integration issues.