Debuting in 2007, the popular open source e-commerce platform, Magento, recently clocked over 4 million downloads of its free Community edition. Since it was acquired by eBay Inc. last year and incorporated into eBay’s X.commerce platform, Magento has also started seeing sales rise for its licensed ‘Enterprise’ and software-as-a-service (SaaS) ‘Go’ editions. Clients range in size from SMB merchants doing less than $US 1 million in sales to large businesses doing more than $US 100 million, according to Roy Rubin, General Manager of Magento under eBay.
Companies and independent technology developers often start by acquiring the free Community version of Magento, in order to explore its capabilities, before migrating to the Go or Enterprise editions. Unfortunately, the Community edition has the downside of requiring plenty of time and expertise to deploy correctly, whereas Go can be set up in no more than a few hours by non-technical employees. The length of time a given platform can take to implement will change depending on the site’s complexity and depth of content.
eBay has also been working hard to integrate Magento into its X.commerce offerings, including the PayPal online payment system, as well as the online marketing and fulfilment offerings of eBay’s GSI Commerce unit.
“We’re spending a lot of time working within the eBay family, taking advantage of synergies to provide a one-stop shop for an e-commerce platform and online payments,” Rubin told Internet Retailer.
Rubin also highlights the amount of work his team does with large eBay sellers as well as merchants in general that don’t necessarily sell on eBay.
“We’re looking at a wide spectrum of what merchants need and what assets we can provide to help them fulfil those needs,” he said.
Rubin believes that the ongoing development of the Magento platform, whether it be internally or by outside developers, is positioning the software against providers like Demandware Inc., IBM Corp.’s Websphere Commerce and Oracle Corp.’s ATG.
However, Gene Alvarez, Vice President and E-Commerce Technology Analyst at Gartner Inc., said that Magento still has some way to go before it is developed enough to really compete against the likes of Websphere or ATG. In particular, Magento needs to prove itself to the really large retailers.
“Magento Enterprise is the new darling for retail organisations that want software to extend and customise their sites,” Alvarez told Internet Retailer. “For retailers with $100 million or less in sales, it’s quite a contender.”
Grant Tildsley, Online Sales and Development Manager for Ted’s Camera Stores, tells Power Retail that his company’s use of Magento has provided “e-commerce best practice and continual development and updates.”
“The fact that Magento is open source allows for a plethora of support and extensions,” Tildsley says. “However submitting support can be very difficult, so we often end up having to pay to fix Magento’s bugs.”
Magento’s source code is readily available as a piece of open source software, so there are inherent security concerns that retailers must be aware of. When there are customers’ credit and other personal details at stake, this can be seen to be a big drawback to using an open source solution.
Article by Campbell Phillips
Campbell is a content creator for The Media Pad, publisher of Power Retail. He has a background in science communication and a long history in retail. Campbell has a keen interest in emerging technologies and their impact in the world of media and online retail. Campbell is an indoor sports junkie, to the point of playing in a local dodgeball competition once a week, “just for kicks”.
