What are the benefits of Magento Commerce?

Magento is the most powerful e-commerce platform on the market. Its open-source architecture allows it to be the best technology for digital businesses, giving the user control of e-commerce, from product creation to the payment experience, launching promotions, and marketing activities.

Today’s leading platform offers solutions for companies of all sizes and is available in two contrasting versions: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. 

How are the two versions different? How do you know which edition is the most suitable for your business? 

In <OH> we elaborate the following guide to tell you which are the main functionalities that differentiate the Commerce version from the Open Source version.

MAGENTO OPEN SOURCE

Formerly call Community, it is Magento’s free open-source platform, available for anyone to download, install, and expand. In this version, users are free to make configuration adjustments in the software to meet their specific needs. 

This version is a popular choice for startups or startups looking for an extensible, feature-pack platform that allows them to compete with large companies. Its ease of use and straightforward management allows customers to create an e-commerce web store quickly and without complications.

MAGENTO COMMERCE

Formerly divide into Enterprise and Cloud Editions, it is an exclusive paid version of Magento with premium features targeting larger organizations and companies with higher customer traffic, larger product catalogs, a broader global presence, and increase business complexity.

This edition enables enterprises to explore its full functionality and scale to virtually any size of deployment.

Commerce gives companies the ability to use official support from the Magento team at: 

• Platform installation.
• Choice and implementation of additional modules and integrations according to the needs of the business model.
• Help to manage the administration panel.
• Support in the implementation of on-page Marketing actions.
  
  Although both editions of Magento have the same code base, there are certain additional features that are only available in the Commerce edition. Let’s explore some of the main features that distinguish one from another:

FUNCTIONALITY

The Commerce version allows users to accomplish much more. The functions are complete and scalable, which simplifies its implementation more than with Open Source.

Features are regularly update as new versions of Commerce are release, making the functionality better and stronger. 

In this way, merchants can create a page that adapts to both B2B and B2C seamlessly and create a great experience for both.

PERFORMANCE

The Commerce version is more agile, faster, and scalable. This is due to its optimize databases and the use of simpler versions of code. 

It comes with Fastly, a Content Delivery Network extension that delivers content more efficiently through caching. This means that pages and content load faster.

In addition, this version includes New Relic, a performance monitoring system that ensures that everything is optimize.

ADVANCED SECURITY

Commerce has a wide variety of security features including firewalls, secure network connectivity, and DDOS protection.

On the other hand, it is PCI compliant and supports credit card tokenization, two fundamental aspects of an e-commerce site. 

These features will ensure that your website and your customer data are protect.

B2B / WHOLESALE MODULE

The robust Magento B2B suite is a very valuable addition to the platform that has robust functionality for B2B merchants including:

• Easy account management
• Quotation and price negotiation
• Prices and personalize catalogs
• Customer specific payment options
• Customer-specific purchase limits and thresholds
• Quick shopping list support
• Quick order by SKU code or CSV upload
• Simplified quote management

PAGE BUILDER

The Commerce version simplifies content management with the page builder, another feature that allows content and templates to be manage much more effectively. 

This functionality enables the creation of content-rich pages with custom layouts that enhance your visual storytelling and drive engagement and customer loyalty.

The page builder enables drag-and-drop content management and the ability to create components to manage content and pages.

Some of the page builder features are:

• Advance content tools
• Full page layouts for CMS pages, products and categories
• Real-time editing from the workspace
• Drag and drop page layout
• Wide variety of content types
• Custom product attribute input types
  At the moment this functionality is exclusive to the Commerce version, although it will be release for the Open Source version soon.

ADVANCE MARKETING TOOLS

Commerce has some advance marketing features that expand its offering in terms of personalization and automation of both content and promotions base on customer types:

CUSTOMER SEGMENT AND CUSTOMIZATION:

It allows you to create personalize shopping experiences for customers who visit your site base on previously establishe conditions. Customers can be automatically assigne to a certain segment through the creation of properties (age, gender, address, location, order history, etc.) in which the characteristics that these customers must have in order to belong are specified. to a certain segment of customers.

These segments will make it possible to direct promotions and personalize content to each of the clients.

LOYALTY STRATEGIES

• Reminder emails: These reminders can be sent automatically to customers when certain conditions set out above are met. For example, when you have add items to your cart but have not complete your purchase or to remind people who have visited your site that they can benefit from a promotion and make a purchase.

• Loyalty point system: This point system can be customize according to the business strategy. From the administration panel, you can configure the expiration of the points and the amount of points assigned to each action carried out by the client.
• Gift card: It is possible to create gift cards that customers can spend within the store itself. From the panel you can define specific aspects of the card. Each of these Magento cards is assign a unique code that the customer must redeem during the purchase process.

SEGMENTED CONTENT

It is possible to define the content to be display on the front-end based on customer segments. 

This functionality makes it possible to visually impact each customer segment in a personalize way, being able to link to different categories or product files depending on shopping preferences or with the aim of presenting a new product according to the interests of each user.

CONTENT UPDATE EVENTS

The premium version of Magento brings a fundamental functionality in the case of offers relate to the sale of stationery products or in specific periods, for example, special dates such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Black Friday, among others.

STORE CREDIT

It is possible to assign a certain store credit to customers. This credit may be use by the customer in all transactions within the store, in addition to being view in their personal area to facilitate monitoring.

FINAL THOUGHTS

We have review the main differences between the open-source and commerce versions of Magento. In terms of functionality, the paid version is superior to its open-source alternative.

However, no edition of Magento is really better or worse than another, they simply address the needs of businesses in different ways.

In all cases, it is essential to carry out a prior evaluation to know if your business model is going to be able to exploit those additional functionalities that the premium version offers and if the sales volume allows you to overcome the expenses to pay an annual license, or if at, On the contrary, it is more convenient to contract the open-source version and integrate payment modules when the conditions and needs to implement them are given.

If you need the help of experts, at <OH> we have everything you need so that you can manage your online store and maximize your payments. Our Magento experts are trained to provide you with a solution that suits your needs.