Magento Open Source: Exclusive Shoppable Experiences

Tallying the differences – between Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce

You wouldn’t disagree with me if I say that Magento was born with skills for eCommerce. Would you? It’s got the perfect recipe for a powerful web store in motion. A number of advantages have contributed to Magento’s lead among all other competitors for eCommerce platforms. It’s mobile-savvy, easy-going, SEO friendly, and customizable with a selflessly devoted group of dedicated developers. Magento is also getting plenty of attention from business owners as it is now powering about 29.89% of stores online. But despite the genius that Magento turns out to be, it still puts those trying to make a choice in a strange dilemma- whether to choose Magento Open Source or Commerce still seems to take merchants to a far end. Well, not anymore, I will help you quickly get to better conclusions here in this blog post.

Magento Open Source – For the Ground-up Online Store

Previously called Magento Community, Magento Open Source, the free and downloadable version came into life due to the rebranding of the entire Magento platform in 2017. Known for its open-source quality, this edition welcomes anyone to download, install and extend with boundless freedom for redistribution on any platform. It comes with brand-new features and enhancements that are now capable of building feature-rich, extensible platforms allowing a number of configuration adjustments to be made based on your specific needs. Is yours a developing startup fiddling with the existing competition in the marketplace? Then try partnering with Magento Open Source to expand your e-commerce capabilities. In no time your customizable web store will start to race up with minimal fuss. Let’s not just limit Magento Open Source to SMBs alone, even enterprises can use it to set a trail on their platforms before finalizing it. This is primarily because the Open Source version is known to be more lightweight than other offerings. With an amazing set of features like visual merchandising, content staging, and page builders Magento Open Source will not fail to fascinate you. Some brands making use of Magento Open Source’s complete potential are BrandAlley, the V&A, PMT Music, PrettyLittleThing, Bucherer, and so on.

Magento Commerce – For Next-Gen Web Store

While Magento Open Source is a free version, Magento Commerce previously called Magento Enterprise is a premium version with a wider set of functionalities. Being a licensed package it is aimed at bigger companies with higher customer traffic, wider global presence, and high turnover e-commerce stores to ensure a rich customer experience. It comes with some exceptional features like advanced marketing, customer reward programs, and targeted promotions. In addition to this, if you subscribe to Magento Commerce you also win the benefit of 24/7 support from the Magento team.

You can make an ambitious drive in your online store with Magento Commerce as it offers an on-premise deployment and a platform-as-a-service hosted solution called Mag

Magento Commerce vs Magento Open Source-Who wins?

You are up to make an ideal choice, so it is necessary to proceed with a neat comparison of Magento Open Source and Commerce. Since both are offspring of the same parent, Magento, they run on the same codebase but Magento Commerce being a premium version comes with some extra features to win the title. But this doesn’t make it an all perfect Magento eCommerce solution. Certain features also take it down south pushing the Open Source Version as the most preferable one. Without much delay, let’s compare, but first, we will look into their common benefits.

Where do Magento Open Source and Commerce strike a Balance?

Here are a few attributes that make them both equally excellent:

• Shopping tools like wish lists, recently viewed and product reviews that encourage customer engagement
• Enabling the operation of a number of websites with a single installation
• Allows a variety of payment options through Braintree, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and more.
• Depending on the customer’s location, it can prefigure the tax, language, and currency used.
• Process orders and shipments with minimal effort and smooth workflow.
• Sophisticated products with plenty of bundles, swatches, and options to choose from.

While these are  features common to the two versions, Magento Commerce takes the lead in some of the features discussed below:

Visual Merchandiser

One of the most useful features that Magento Commerce can be proud of is the merchandiser extension. It’s an option that allows you to create catalog pages with ease via a simple drag-and-drop interface. Customers find it more appealing as they can easily land on category pages with any kind of conditions – use price, latest product name, trending products, and colors. Products can be listed with an easy push to the first or last position depending on the availability. Due to the ease of purchase that the visual merchandiser guarantees, Magento Commerce drives more sales. But the Open Source users do not enjoy the benefit of the automated sorting by the virtual merchandiser.

Elastic Search

Again this highly scalable catalog search is built into the search solution of Magento Commerce to implement suggestions and recommendations in search. Other attributes that this feature offers is a correction to misspellings, stop words, and synonym management to help customers to exactly locate what they are looking for.

• With elastic search, admins can now store and analyze huge chunks of data as all queries entered into the search box show results in real time.
• It gives you the liberty to easily replace the MySQL search engine
• Character filters will help you remove unwanted characters from the search input.

Talking elastic search is slightly more advanced in Commerce than the option available in Magento Open Source.

Customer Segmentation

Sorting your customers is no longer a difficult process. At the heart of Magento Commerce lies Customer Segmentation which allows you to optimize marketing strategies based on targeted customers. With customer segments, you can personalize the customer’s journey based on their address, shopping cart, order history, and so on. This feature will immensely contribute to customer satisfaction and facilitate meaningful conversations with them as you group them into segments with similar attributes.

Reward Points and Loyalty Programs

Again this is known to be one of the most powerful Reward programs in Magento Commerce and one of the ways to retain loyal customers. It’s a point earning and spending system based on the set of transactions that your customer indulges in. Primarily the activities include subscribing, repurchasing, reviewing, rating, and much more. You will have your customers around since they can use the reward points during purchase. It also is a playful and enjoyable feature that makes your customers glued to your online brand providing you reward them with labels of coins, flowers, and much more.

Weaving the Web of Magento Commerce Cloud

Before we begin, let me rewind to make sure that we are on the same page. As part of the Magento eCommerce extension, I previously mentioned a cloud option to leverage the magic of Magento Commerce. Yes, the Magento Cloud team has seen tremendous adoptions of the cloud service by its Commerce customers due to the excellent infrastructure it provides. It is a robust PaaS solution in the sense that it runs on Amazon Web Services. It wouldn’t be a surprise that Commerce Cloud is blessed with plenty of features that take the security, performance, and scalability of your web store to the next level. The Magento cloud team has also launched an ece-tools package that comes with scalable deployment tools to match all kinds of customer needs. Various processes can be simplified using the scripts and commands in the ece-tool-package including backing up the database, verifying environment configuration, cron management, and more. For all obvious reasons, Magento Commerce Cloud can easily solve problems occurring in your online store as everything is hosted on Cloud.  As a forerunner to Magento Commerce, it comes with a full-featured administrative suite with all the previously mentioned features of the Commerce version. Cloud also worked towards better Page Speed enhancements. Do you know how high-resolution images and videos reflect the quality of your brand online, Magento Cloud’s Image Optimisation powered by Fastly will boost the website’s capability to load quality photos before seeing the customer’s wrath. What’s more, it manages web traffic with skills employing features like order archiving, scalable backend product management, and customer support. If you have Magento Commerce Cloud under the belt half of your operational responsibilities are met with extra care to security. Its Web Application Firewall blocks malware from penetrating into your eCommerce store.

How can Pattem Digital give you the best Magento eCommerce experience?

Are you planning big for a brand new eCommerce store? We know that you want one that’s swiftly responsive, highly user-friendly, and sales-generating. Entrust us with your needs and we at Pattem will transform them into the web store of your dreams. Our Magento Development services are a perfect blend of cutting-edge technology and marketplace trends giving you an end-to-end online shopping portal. To experience the global exposure and expertise of our talented Magento developers contact us today.