eBay Announces Magento Go Closure – What This Means for E-Commerce Business Owners

The e-commerce market is right now moving at a pace that hardly anyone can realistically keep up with. It wasn’t too long ago that the idea of an online store was rather far-fetched to say the least – a few big businesses and highly-innovative entrepreneurs had them, but very few others. Since then, building an e-commerce enterprise has to a large extent become a walk in the park, though at the same time it can be problematic to keep up to speed with the constant shifts in software, hosting and performance expectations.     This is of course illustrated rather painfully in the recently announced decision to terminate Magento Go, which as of February next year will cease to exist. eBay’s decision to do away with Magento Go comes on the back of the firm’s apparent commitment to championing superior performance and the long-term success of its members/clients.“Going forward, we’re focusing our resources on Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition, two solutions that better support and better equip small and medium size merchants to prosper in the evolving and increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape,” wrote eBay Enterprise’s SVP of Product and Strategy, Mark Lavelle.Of course, the good news to come out of the doom and gloom is that February is still a good seven months away, so there’s plenty of time for Magento Go merchants to get busy making the necessary alterations and changes to the online enterprises. And in terms of where to take things, Magento Go merchants are basically faced with the choice of going to Magento Community or Magento Enterprise.What’s the difference?

• Magento Community – Free to own and operate, open source and brilliantly versatile. On the whole, a pretty perfect choice for small to medium sized businesses.
• Magento Enterprise – Charges an annual fee, but at the same time offers the kind of massive power needed by bigger companies and businesses with huge online presences.

In terms of which to go to, it all comes down to a case of weighing up not only current site usage along with store and database size, but also where you expect/hope to take things in the future. It’s largely impossible to go wrong in terms of the basics when it comes to features and performance, but in the case of any business that’s at least expecting to hit the big time over the coming months or years, it might be worth thinking big…as in Enterprise big.As far as migration goes, exactly how difficult the process will be depends on the size, nature and complexity of the business you’re currently running. However, you will have to make sure you make allowances for things like design compatibility, database re-establishment, the adaption of new features and how you’ll keep your store and service offerings running seamlessly throughout the transition.As may be apparent at this point, Magento migration is on the whole a less-than easy job to tackle…one that’s best-suited to the hands of the professional. On the plus side though, once you’ve made your way to a bigger, better and more capable way of running your e-commerce business, you’ll be in-line for a host of benefits the likes of which you’d never otherwise have gotten access to.