On July 1st, 2014 Magento announced they would be shutting down their Magento Go ecommerce platform effective February 2015. While it’s nice of them to see customers through the holiday season, it’s a terrible situation for Magento Go customers who now need a Magento GO replacement ready to launch in 7 months.
In February 2011 Magneto Commerce launched a SAAS (software as a service) version of their popular Magento CE (Community Edition) named Magento GO. It was aimed at smaller, less technical merchants who desired top ecommerce features at a monthly fee affordable for most small business.
Given that their whole pitch was aimed at less technical merchants who desired big merchant features, this decisions leaves them in a very precarious predicament. We develop Magento CE ecommerce sites for clients and had looked into moving them to Magento Go a few years ago and decided against it for two reasons:
1. We offer essentially what Magento Go aims to do and well beyond: Hands off management of the Magento platform to include upgrades, maintenance, SEO, marketing and support all at a price set for small businesses to afford.
2. With SAAS service, the thing that saves money is the same thing that can hold a merchant back. Since the provider develops new technology that is then applied to all subscribers the development cost is shared amongst them all making it affordable. However, no subscriber can truly customize anything because new feature are at the mercy of the service provider whim.
Obviously we made the right choice for our clients. Now the question for those who did choose Magento Go is: what is the best Magento Go replacement?
The answer to this is different for each merchant but they all need to find a Magento Go replacement that offers reasonable, consistent monthly pricing along with sophisticated ecommerce tools. While there are a variety of ecommerce choices out there, we feel there are only two Magento Go replacment options to consider.
Perhaps the best and easiest choice is Magento CE. The challenge is to secure a service provider that can develop Magento CE and offer a service that provides a similar pricing model to what Magento Go offered such as our Magento Go Migration Service.
If you don’t actually need all those features, the second choice would be replacing Magento Go with WooCommerce which runs on the WordPress platform. Between Magento and WooCommerce they encompass 24% of the total ecommerce marketplace, which is more than twice the marketshare of any other solution.
Our next post “Magento Go Alternatives” we will go into more detail about each of these options we recommend for your Magento Go transition. We do of course offer solutions for either of these options with our Magento Go Migration Service.