Once you have your online business built on a successful eCommerce platform, you can relax and focus on your core business. A niche and carefully designed platform provide a customized line of business tooling that suits your needs. However, before you decide a platform on basis of price alone, conduct an impact analysis how investing in Magento Enterprise may prove beneficial for you, perhaps even increase the overall return of your online trade.
As a consulting firm, WebBee has worked with both large organizations and small start-ups. Each of these operates differently and come across as two opposite-end-of-the-spectrum. Their view on how the business money should be spent varies hugely. Large organizations often spend vast amounts of money when faced with problems. On the other hand, we have seen that smaller organizations struggle for long with the idea of when and how to spend any money at all. With a little planning and forethought, a platform which delivers quick results within the budget is easy to find.
For start-ups with little investment capital or funding, Magento Community is a viable option. In comparison to other hosted shopping carts such as Shopify, Magento provides considerably more functionality. It allows the entities to use some of the savings in marketing and advertising besides the platform. However, if your business has already settled and held a firm ground in the market, you may look for a more robust option like Magento Enterprise to target a line of business tooling around merchandising, target marketing, and customer service.
Consider these 6 questions below and decide if investing in Magento Enterprise appeals to you:
- Is your business a hobby or a major source of income?
Many new businesses have the mindset that if Community Edition is working fine for them, they do not see the need to invest in an enterprise solution. I hold the view that it is okay to continue with the community edition until the time you are not serious about expanding and growing your business. Something you are doing on the side to supplement your income. If it’s not, why should it be treated like one?
If you find licensing a robust and supported eCommerce platform as ‘too expensive’ when it is less than 10% of your online revenue, you are treating your business like a hobby. Why?
We have two reasons for you to consider making an investment in Enterprise Edition. First, Magento Enterprise offers safe and secure mission-critical support, a secure payment gateway, and enriched management elements required for a smooth functioning of a business. Many merchants lose sales and potential customer due to the lack of simple support or security issues.
Second, which is most important, is the added functionality that facilitates the growth of your business with elements such as target marketing, improved upsell/cross-sell functionality, and improved product visibility in the search.
Companies spend money to build this functionality or leverage third-party expertise and modules which may or may not turn out to fulfill our needs in the long run. These investments can be saved and a tried and tested module can be used instead of these.
Driving traffic to your site and then converting them into customers is also a major requirement of the online businesses. Many organizations spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to their site. Driving customer to the site isn’t enough, they also require increasing the shopping cart’s average checkout price, and increase the customer lifetime value (CLT) by getting those customers to revisit their site and make purchases.
All this is supported with the added features of Magento Enterprise.
- What is the nature of your business? Does it require promotions and reward programs to help attract and convert customers?
If the products or services you promote are highly competitive in nature and require you to invest in pay per click campaigns, the last thing you want is for prospective customers to not find what they are looking for after visiting your site. Magento Enterprise makes sure this not happen through the following:
Advanced Customer Segmentation: As the name suggests, it divides the visitors into different groups based on their buying history, demographics, their browsing history, and search terms.
Targeted Merchandizing: One of the major point here to consider is getting the right content in front of the potential visitors to convert them into customers. The Enterprise edition of Magento leverages Customer Segmentation with tailored content, upsells or cross-sells, and increased conversion rates which make is worthy of your investment.
- Do you have advanced customer service facility?
Advanced customer service is available with Enterprise version which provides the following:
Assisted Shopping: This feature allows your call center representatives to walk the valued customer through the shopping experience and answer their queries along the way. This facility is useful when your products are complex in nature, B2B PO buying, and for clients who find it difficult to understand the technical information.
Advanced Return Management Authorization and Store Credit: With Magento Enterprise you can avail the facility for returns, manage refund and store credits at the same time.
Contract Pricing: The Enterprise version of Magento facilitates business-to-business (B2B) relationships in multiple ways. This also includes supporting different price options for different groups of customers.
Product Personalization: Personalize products with engraving or monogramming to give them a touch of their own in the products they buy.
- Do constantly make changes to your static content, product catalog, or in-depth merchandising?
With the current evolving nature of the e-commerce world, business merchants need to be agile in their approach towards managing their content; creating landing pages and swapping out promo spots, etc. A feature-rich and robust CMS helps companies to quickly adapt to new market opportunities and change accordingly. Magento Enterprise offers apt business tools for content management through a robust CRM. You can manage your content easily and keep up with the changing pace of the online business by providing relevant information to your customers at the right time.
- Do you have technical support knowledge or is security, stability, and timeliness of support an issue for you?
Though easy, yet, Magento is not a plug and play e-commerce solution. It requires technical expertise for its configuration and initial setup. If you deal in technology, say developing and selling software applications, then you can handle the installation and support the Magento solution. However, if your primary business is selling antiques or clothes, you should consider investing in the Enterprise version. It provides:
Enterprise Level Support:
- Service Level Agreement
- Installation and downloads
- Access to Magento consultants for catalog setup & advanced marketing promotions
- Configuration of your shopping cart with payment modes, shipping options, tax rates, and languages
- Priority support for loss of mission-critical and business-critical features and functions.
Enterprise Security:
- It is PA-DDS compliant platform that adheres to the PCI Security Standards Council’s regulations.
- Transferring customer data, and support for strong encryption and secure transactions.
If you have an in-house technical team or expert, Magento Community is a good option. Certified Magento developers are well-equipped with knowledge and experience to support business-critical issues. However, the community edition is supported by the community and issues may not get the same attention as those in the Enterprise version.
- Does your business experience high traffic volumes or seasonal bursts of visitors?
Magento Enterprise supports full page caching and multi-server load balancing during high traffic days and peak seasons. Of course, scalability and performance can also be accomplished with the Community version as well but Magento support services make all the difference here in times of troubleshooting. This is worth your investment during high sales and profit-making season. The worst time for your site to go down is when your traffic is at its highest. Additionally, Magento’s flexible licensing structure allows additional servers to be added for up to 3 months out of one year.
Conclusion
Assess your business carefully before investing. While both versions of Magento (Community or Enterprise) greatly benefits e-commerce business, make sure that you have all the functionalities that your business requires for its growth and success.
WebBee Global is an Indian company focused on facilitating businesses with their online eCommerce solutions by adding value to their growth and their brand with efficient ERP integration and bespoke web development services. We offer Magento designing and development services.
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