Magento Blog

Throughout time, the Dutch have provided us with numerous innovations: the microscope, the telescope, submarines, 4WD, and the compact disc. Now, they have a new contribution specifically for the Magento development community, Plundor. The creation of Dutchmen Guido Jansen and Sander Schoneville, Plundor serves a marketing program for Magento extension builders, generating a lot of publicity by giving Magento developers the chance to purchase their extension as part of a “bundle” of complementary Magento extensions at a hefty discount.

For Magento developers, the deals will be quite substantial. Each bundle will feature approximately 6-8 extensions with a commercial value of $600-1,200 and will be sold for under $150. Plundor will only be selling one bundle at a time, which will be available for two weeks, and they aim to offer 4-6 bundles per year.

For Magento extension builders, Plundor seeks to provide an equally valuable amount of marketing exposure. While extension builders will get paid each time a bundle that features their extension gets sold – even if their extension is not used – Plundor should be viewed more as a marketing tool, rather than a substantial revenue stream, as is the case with vendors that participate in similar online deal programs. In addition to gaining exposure from Plundor’s site, email campaigns and media partners, extension builders will also gain access to the email addresses of everyone who purchases the bundle. This is beneficial to both the customer and the extension builder because after the bundle is sold, the extension builder will become primary contact for the customer.

If you haven’t heard of Guido Jansen, you should look into him. He’s quite impressive. We recently had the opportunity to ask him some questions regarding Plundor in preparation for tomorrow’s public launch:

• What is your background in Magento and what inspired the creation of Plundor?

  I’ve been working with Magento since July 2008. I was previously working a lot with the Joomla CMS system as a freelancer while finishing my studies in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Just like I did previously with Joomla, I started creating an online community, Dutchento.org, organizing events, and working with many first-time users of Magento in The Netherlands as a business consultant.

  The business model for Plundor isn’t unique. You can find several successful businesses with a similar idea, but no one had applied it to the Magento community. We thought it would be a good idea to introduce it.

• Are there any important trends you have noticed in the Magento development community, especially among extension developers?

  Generally speaking, we’ve seen the quality of extension development companies and commercial extensions rising to a level where they can be used for much larger projects. Most recently, extension developers are now able to create extensions that work with Magento Go and receive the appropriate certification from Magento. Looking ahead, another big thing to expect is extensions that take advantage of the X.Commerce Fabric, but that is still in a very early stage.

• What do you see as the biggest opportunities for Magento and its developer community moving forward?

  X.commerce and the driving force it will become for clicks & bricks retailers.

• When choosing extensions, what type of selection criteria will you look at beyond developers’ willingness to offer their extension at a significant discount?

  We look at several pieces of criteria. The most important two, I think, are the usefulness of the extension – will it help a lot of developers or just a specific group?) and the maturity of the company – its other extensions and ability to provide support.

If you are interested in promoting your own extension in one of their bundles, you will need to fill out their Business Application Form. If you’d like to be an official Media Partner like Blue Acorn (and who wouldn’t want to be like us?), you will need to fill out their Media Partner Application Form. As a Media Partner, you will also be able to take part in Plundor’s Affiliate Program, where you will receive $10 for every sale you send their way. Stay tuned to our Magento blog for advanced notice of the latest Plundor bundles. The first one is available, starting…now!

You might have considered it love at first sight. It was a relationship that began over three and a half years ago, when we posted our first review of Magento, a platform we instantly recognized as a soon-to-be leader in the eCommerce space. It was a welcome addition in a market that was saturated with lackluster options in the small and mid-tier. Yes, there were plenty of fish in the sea, but none that caught our fancy quite like this platform It was sexy on the outside, intelligent on the inside, and had a good head on its shoulders.

Courtship

We were introduced to Magento through a mutual friend, and from afar, we learned more and more about it. The more we learned, the more interested we became. We built up the nerve to embark on our first date together, and after a few more, we began to see that this platform could be “the one.” Granted, things were unwieldy at first, and getting to know each other wasn’t easy. There were no instructions on how to understand its seemingly complex ways, no book entitled Blue Acorns are from Mars, Magento is from Venus to guide us. There were a lot of late nights and arguments (with the computer), but such is the case with any good relationship, you have to work hard at it. We knew the rewards of working through this initial learning curve would be well worth it, and we were right.

At the time, we were a small business without any outside financial backing, which meant we would need to take things slow. We knew that in order for this to work long term, we would have to focus on building a strong foundation of developers, not sales people. We were in uncharted waters at this point, but we were committed to mapping out our own path of success by fully dedicating ourselves to the relationship.

Going Steady

After a considerable investment of time and energy, Magento had become our eCommerce platform of choice. We became evangelists. In fact, we have a “Magento Evangelist” on staff, Ben Marks. Seriously, that’s his actual title. Having trained over 100 developers on Magento across three continents, we think he’s earned it. We also became an early adopter of the Magento Partner Program. It was a signal to our clients that we were serious in bringing together best of breed services with best of breed software. It was also a signal to Magento that we were ready for our relationship to grow to new heights.

Since we’ve been going steady, our relationship hasn’t just grown. It’s flourished. Magento has been folded into eBay’s X.commerce ecosystem, and Blue Acorn has been experiencing over 300% year-over-year growth rates. Our success can be attributed to an obsessive focus on the quality of our deliverable, and it came with sacrifices.

As our last blog post explains, we became “that person” in a new relationship, ignoring our friends, our blogs, speaking opportunities, and almost every other form of self-promotional effort. We were okay with that too. While others were busy talking a lot about it, we were busy doing it. With this approach, we have been able to achieve our goals and then some, and now is the time to take our relationship to the next level.

The Big Commitment

In celebration of three years together, Blue Acorn is making three big commitments to reconfirm our dedication to Magento and X.Commerce.

• Speaking at the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference

  Following the success of this year’s Imagine eCommerce Worldwide Conference, we are extremely excited for the X.commerce Innovate Developer Conference this week, especially because one of our own will be a speaker. Magento has invited Blue Acorn Founder & CEO, Kevin Eichelberger to take the stage alongside Magento System Architect, Dmitriy Soroka. Together, they will present a technical overview on Magento, from both development and business perspectives. Kevin’s strong understanding of the Magento platform and how it can be applied to create a strategic advantage for online retailers made him a natural selection for the session.

  If you can’t wait to see Kevin (and who could?), he’ll be distributing free beers and smiles at a Pre-Innovate Tweetup at the Parc 55 Wyndham at 7:30pm on October 11. This event is hosted by the community at large with several contributions from many including Rhonda Rondeau (Magento), Roy Rubin (Magento), Blue Acorn, Kimberly Thomas (Red Light Blinking), Guidance, WebShopApps, and SUMO Heavy. We were anicipating an intimate gathering, but as of this posting, over 120 people have registered. We love the enthusiasm!

• Magento Developer Certification Program

  The Innovate DevCon will also host the launch of the Magento Developer Certification beta exam, and we’ve had our hands in that as well. Two of the sixteen Advisory Board members for Magento’s new certification program work for Blue Acorn. We’re honored to be part of such an esteemed group in shaping the qualifications for certifying Magento developers, as we’ve been advocates for a certification program – ourselves – after years of witnessing the results of poor Magento development from other agencies time and time again.

  Through our involvement on the Advisory Board, we’ve helped in driving the direction of the program, along with the actual topics and questions to be covered and to what degree. “The exam has been developed using the most rigorous industry standards and methodologies to ensure its accuracy in evaluating relevant skills,” and it creates a standard for credibility within the global Magento ecosystem. “We acknowledge the high expectations placed on this community, and we’ve ensured that this program raises the bar even higher,” said Susie Sedlacek, Head of Services, Magento. “We’ve worked closely with an independent Advisory Board to identify the job skills needed to develop business-level extensions and strong implementations on Magento.”¹

• Magento Gold Solution Partner

  Individual developers aren’t the only ones who will be seeing the bar raised. Magento Solution Partners – new and existing – are now subject to a higher degree of validation. That means review time, and we are happy to announce that Blue Acorn’s commitment to Magento has not gone ignored. Our customers continue to love us, and we are proud to be Magento’s newest Gold Solution Partner. After all, what good is renewing your vows if there isn’t a little gold involved?

Looking Ahead

Having received the increasingly coveted Gold Solution Partner status, two spots on the Developer Certification Advisory Board, and a spot at the podium at the X.Commerce DevCon, Blue Acorn is as involved with Magento Commerce than we have ever been.

This doesn’t mean we’re satisfied, though. The best thing about our industry is that it is constantly evolving. Magento’s recent acquisition by eBay, Inc. will bring about even more opportunities for our relationship to further develop. We look forward to being involved in the new X.Commerce and X Fabric communities and understanding how these technologies can be applied to further help online retailers grow.

Who would have imagined that a small eCommerce services company would embark on a path to revolutionize the eCommerce marketplace? Who would have imagined that the software they developed would, in two years’ time, process more than $25 billion in transactions, power some of the world’s most renowned brands, employ more than 240 people, and create an entire marketplace for developers, consultants, and marketers alike? Who would have imagined that they accomplished this all within three years’ time? Well, they did, and so did we.

This was the theme of Roy Rubin’s keynote speech at the first ever Magento Imagine eCommerce conference. Magento’s accomplishments over a very short period of time are astonishing, but not surprising. Roy also touched on an analogy I frequently use – a pre-Magento / post-Magento world in eCommerce. When Magento first came to market three years ago, we were keenly aware of its power immediately, and we quickly jumped on board as an early adopter of the product and the partner program. Our goal is to provide best of breed software, with best of breed services to empower our clients to sell more. And Magento provides just that – a platform that we can leverage strategically to help our clients in the difficult process of continually moving that needle.

Its successes are not surprising to us, but the pace at which this has all happened sure has. Magento has become the fastest growing eCommerce platform in the world, and is poised to become the largest open source software company as well. With everything happening so quickly, they managed to find the time to host their first ever Imagine eCommerce Conference. In 90 days’ time they put together one of the best conferences I personally have attended.

A Conference for the eCommerce Ecosystem

The near two day event took place in LA at the Hilton LAX, and was flawlessly executed. I’m not just saying this to kiss some orange Magento butt – it truly was well put together. It was a high energy, enthusiastic event showcasing Magento’s successes, accomplishments, and direction. The underlying theme since day one for Magento has been to empower the “eCommerce ecosystem” – and their presentations demonstrated just that. With the introduction of the Magento Go platform, they are now able to reach merchants from the earliest stages of startup, to the largest retailers in the world with Enterprise Edition. With new offerings including 24×7 around the world support, training and certification classes, an expert consulting group, robust mobile applications, and a unified development platform to work across all flavors of Magento – they’ve aggressively put together the infrastructure to sustain this growth and the marketplace they’ve created.

The event featured inspirational keynotes from the likes of Blake Nordstrom and Alfred Lin of Zappos and breakout sessions to focus on specific topics. The breakouts were divided into two tracks – technical and business – which covered topics ranging from unit testing in Magento to how to leverage the Enterprise platform to grow revenue. This allowed for topical breakdowns that would appease the crowd of roughly one-third developers, one-third merchants, and one-third partners. The feedback we received from many attendees of the sessions were overall positive, and seemingly more useful than some of the “fluff” you encounter at many other industry conferences.  Two evening events held at the Hilton and at Magento HQ showcased a true, LA style party complete with DJs, food trucks, cocktails, and fun.  As a Magento partner ourselves, we were also treated to an invite only event and dinner at the Encounter Restaurant LAX.

Magento also announced the next Imagine eCommerce Conference to be held in the fall 2011 in Europe, and if you’re able to make it I highly recommend it. Otherwise, they’ll be back in the states soon I’m sure, and I look forward to the opportunity to revisit the experience.

The Magento Community

For us, the event was extremely successful becuase it allowed us to meet with the folks at Magento, passionate community contributors and developers, Magento partners, clients, other Magento users, and extension developers. These relationships are ultimately at the core of Magento’s model – this is the eCommerce ecosystem – and it was all brought together in one venue to share ideas, network, and dream big. Our clients that attended had positive feedback, and they’re excited to know that they’re on a platform that is going to support them through all stages of their business. I’d like to take a minute to mention a few people that we had the pleasure of getting to know in person after having spent years conversing with many of you on twitter (@blueacorn) – it was great spending time with you all (in no particular order).

Ashley Schroder (@aschroder)
Alan Storm (@alanstorm)
WebShopApps (@webshopapps) – Karen, Cara, Genevieve
Unirgy (@unirgy) – Boris
Vinai Kopp (@vinaikopp)
Sumo Heavy (@sumoheavy) – Bart and Robert
Brent Peterson (@brentwpeterson)
eBizMarts (@ebizmarts) – Ignacao
Classy Llama (@classyllama) – Erik and Kurt
Sessions Digital (@sessiondigital) – Alistair
Adam McCombs (@adammccombs) and Robert Banh (@robertbanh)
Sweet Tooth (@getsweettooth) – Jay
Rackspace (@rackspace) – Jacob, Thomas, Jake, Doug

All of the folks at Magento especially (too many to list here but I’ll try) Mosses, Scott, Susie, Kara, Adi, Roy, Udi, Brian, Tim, Melissa, Ryan, Paul, Bob, Yoav, Andrew, Rhonda, Brittany, Shannon – we look forward to the continued empowerment of the eCommerce ecosystem and working closely with you all.

Some of our clients (both in and out of the conference) Sarah, Randy, Jason, Alison, Ethan, Pete, and John it was great to meet face to face and discuss how Blue Acorn and Magento are going to empower you for long term growth.

If I left anyone out (we had lots of great conversations there, hard to track of them all) I apologize. There is a great flickr feed of photos from the conference as well as on Magento’s flickr feed. Simon Lilly also put together a great collection of presentations, videos, and blogs from the conference that if you weren’t able to attend – I highly recommend you spend some time reviewing.

Thank you all for making it such an enjoyable time and for taking the time to chat “eCommerce” with us. We look forward to the opportunity to spend some time together again soon but in the meantime – Go Go Magento Go!

It’s one of the biggest questions circling the Magento community for quite some time now – will online merchants running Magento Community Edition be able to achieve PCI Compliance?  It comes as no surprise to me that many answers to this simple question were ill-informed, and broadly ranged from flat out “no (you’ll need Enterprise Edition)”, to “yes, piece of cake”.  With many merchant service providers getting down to laying down the law with smaller retailers, this question has become more and more frequent as of late.  And yet still, lots of confusion, and lack of a clear answer.  So let me lay down a definitive answer for you:

“I’m an online retailer running Magento Community Edition – can I achieve PCI Compliance?”  YES

I’m not going to delve into all the details about what is PCI Compliance, and how it relates to PA-DSS, and all of the details involved with achieving PCI Compliant status, or even why you need to be PCI compliant – there’s a myriad of resources that dives into those details of which I will not rehash.  To make matters worse, I’ve heard of inconsistent enforcement of these policies, that are created by the credit card companies themselves, and enforced at the merchant service provider level.  At the end of the day, it is important to understand that PCI Compliance is for your business, the software you run is only one component of becoming compliant, and thus the larger issues and questions at hand are going to involve issues outside of Magento.  Magento itself is not PCI Compliant – software cannot be PCI Compliant.  So the correct context is always referring to your business as being PCI Compliant – not the software. The process for achieving PCI Compliance for your business is also dependent on your sales volume, of which you can fall into one of four levels.

The inspiration of this article started with a tweet about PCI Compliance and Magento CE (Community Edition).  Magento has taken strides to ensure that the Enterprise and Professional Editions are PA-DSS certified through their Payment Bridge thus ensuring the passing of that PCI requirement by merchants running that software.  So this article focuses on the Community Edition – which is where the ambiguity always lied to begin with.  But that tweet grew wings and spawned a number of replies, emails, and discussions from service providers, hosts, and merchants running the software.  It’s a hot topic, that to get an answer to required a great deal of research and discussions with folks from the merchant services sector, to hosting providers, retailers having to walk through this process, and Magento team members themselves.  The following represents the outcome of numerous conversations on this topic, with the hope that this might simplify someone else’s life as they embark on this dreadful journey.  I’m not pretending to be an expert on PCI Compliance, nor should this be considered an absolute truth, but it is a summary of what I’ve learned through the process of achieving PCI compliance for a client of ours running Magento CE.

eCommerce and PCI Compliance

In its simplest form, if you store credit card data in any shape or form – the system in which you are storing that information is held to a very rigid standard in order for your business to be approved for PCI Compliance.  Let me provide you an example scenario, if you are running Magento Commerce Community Edition and use authorize.net (or similar payment gateway) – that means that your Magento Commerce install is “in scope” of needing to pass certain standards for PCI Compliance.   Which means, depending on your level, you may need to have that system pass a strict PCI audit.  An interesting statistic – out of the hundreds of eCommerce platforms available on the market, only a handful have passed PA-DSS certification (which is the certification given to software that has passed this rigorous screening).  It’s an expensive, time consuming process that software companies don’t even want to get into on their own platforms – so the general consensus is – you do NOT want to go down a path of putting your software through a PCI audit.

How to Be PCI Compliant on Magento

You have a few options on how to achieve PCI Compliance – but it might require some changes to how you handle credit card processing.  Take note of Magento Professional and Enterprise Editions – Magento did not make the software itself PA-DSS certified.  Instead, they created a separate platform, dubbed “Payment Bridge” that handles all credit card processing, and this stand-along system is PA-DSS certified.  And by using this for processing credit card transactions, the onus is no longer on the eCommerce platform, but specifically on the processing system (Payment Bridge).  There are many reasons for this, but it basically allows Magento to have some creative liberties with the platform and not have to jump through hoops with every upgrade in ensuring that each release gets re-certified.

Currently, Payment Bridge is not available for Community Edition, but there are several options for achieving PCI Compliance on Magento:

1. Use only hosted payment methods (paypal express, cybersource hosted order page, authorizenet SIM) – and you’re out of “PCI scope” – meaning you don’t have to have your software be PCI Certified because you’re not storing any credit card information locally or processing any transaction on your server.
   The downside: You are redirected to another site, which is not really a seamless solution and the Conversion expert in us would advise against this.  Or, Magento currently has on their roadmap to integrate with Cybersource Silent Order Post – which would be the most seamless of these options.
2. Use a SaaS PCI compliant payment application like CRE Secure – which again puts your out of “PCI scope” again because the actual credit card processing happens offsite on someone else’s server that is already PCI Certified.  This service essentially serves up the checkout page from their server and processes the transactions there.  Best yet, it supports 4 of the primary payment gateways used today with Authorize.net, Paypal, Chase Paymentech, and Payleap so you can most likely stick with your current merchant services provider.
   The downside: Unfortunately, the URL does change with this service, so while the form may look consistent with the site (which is an improvement over #1) – the URL does change which could cause some checkout confusion with your users and possible cart abandonment.
3. Use our Magento Payment Bridge solution (on-premise small payment application, PA-DSS compliant) – you’re out of “PCI scope” with Magento, and the Payment Bridge (smaller, simpler, separate app) solution is the software that needs to be compliant – which it already is.  This is available free of charge with Enterprise and Professional Editions of Magento and would require an upgrade from Community Edition.  There are some technical requirements in PCI compliant hosting for the website, and two additional servers (web + db) that are secured and separate from the store.  It does support the major gateways: authorize.net, payflow pro, paypal direct (us & uk) and of all of the options mentioned thus far, has the most seamless user experience by integrating the payment form from the MPB server and embedding that into an IFRAME into Magento checkout.
   The downside: Unfortunately, there is more significant cost involved here than the three aforementioned solutions.
4. If you treat Magento with any payment method (like you are most likely doing now) it will depend on your merchant level which can range from tier 1 (over 6 million transactions) where this would be considered a custom solution and thus a PCI assessment of the whole system is required for PCI Compliance.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, if you’re processing less than 20K eCommerce transactions per year then you fall into a tier 4 where you can get by with as little as an annual Self-Assesment Questionnaire (SAQ) and a quarterly scan of your server.  If you already have McAfee Secure then you should also have access to their PCI scan and certification service, if not, there are a variety of companies out there that provide this service.
   The downside: This can be a time consuming, confusing process.  If you fall into tier 3 or 4, this can be the most cost effective option, but tiers 1 and 2 can be enough to warrant considering looking at the other options above.

PCI Compliance Enforcement

The most confusing aspect of determining how you can become PCI Compliant is the enforcement of it.  This is an industry wide regulation handed down by credit card companies but enforced by merchant services providers – many of whom don’t even understand how to enforce it themselves.  Which leads to “well my MSP said all I need to do is this” and hence, eighteen different answers to the same question.

At the end of the day, this is an issue not specific to Magento Commerce.  All merchants on all platforms have to face this same battle, and many of them have fewer options than this.  PCI Compliance was brought down upon merchants by credit card companies to help protect the data of cardholders and protect against fraud, which overwhelmingly happens at the small business level (according to Coalfire up to 90%) so it’s not surprising that this process is costly, and time consuming especially for small businesses.  Over time I feel that some better options will present themselves, but in the end, removing the processing of credit card processing from your server, in some shape or form, is going to be the easiest, most cost-effective solution for small to medium sized merchants while still providing the security and data protection that credit card companies are looking for.

Some additional helpful information:

• PCI Compliant Hosting article at Crucial
• Magento PCI Compliance Overview
• PCI DSS Standard
• Magento PCI Webinar Recap

If you have additional insight to share about your experiences with PCI Compliance on Magento, please, join the conversation.

This post started off as a head-to-head comparison of Magento Community Edition vs. Professional Edition, and as I started writing, there were grumblings of a Professional Edition being released, and as such this post got put on hold until its official release (comparison available here).  The reasoning for this post started from a tweet we posted back in April, stemming from some sales calls whereby several prospects had discussed with us the question of whether they should use the Professional Edition or the Community Edition of Magento Commerce  - at the time, these were the only choices available.  In those discussions however, several of those people had indicated that they had in fact contacted Magento directly in search of an answer to this very question.  What the Magento sales team was telling them, was surprising, but understandable.

What these prospects were being told, and I’m paraphrasing here, was that Magento Community Edition was, in a sense, a waste of their time, and that they really had to use the Enterprise Edition.  Now, I get that these are salespeople, most likely working on commission, but I found it strange that they were basically bashing their own product for the “upsell”.  What I would have found more appropriate, is an honest evaluation, maybe even a questionnaire, to help determine if the Enterprise Edition is a better fit for someone than the Community Edition.  Because, in reality, these specific companies I talked with, had no reason why the Enterprise Edition was any better for them than the Community Edition.  They were not to the scale of needing an Enterprise Platform, most of which were smaller operations without a need for Admin level permissions, auditing, staging, etc.  The $12K per year didn’t provide enough value add that would solve a specific business need, address a particular set of functionality that they required, or offer any kind of value on top of the Community Edition that made the cost worth it.  Sure, these advanced functionalities were really nice bells and whistles – but where they really needed?  When you get down to it, it is a cost-benefit analysis.  Oh wait, there’s gift cards and credits.  Which I personally like to joke a lot about because this is one of the most basic functionalities that most eCommerce platforms have that they decided to leave out of the Community Edition – and with all the advanced functionality that Magento has, leaving out that one little piece amuses me.  But back to the story…

So, I found myself in a situation having to really educate these people on the true differences of the Enterprise Edition vs. the Community Edition, to help them make an educated decision for themselves.  No sales pitch, no bias, I don’t care one way or the other, I just want to make sure they think it through and make a smart decision.  After this conversation with people I usually hear comments like “oh, I didn’t realize that” or “I didn’t think Community Edition could be PCI compliant”, or even “well, the person at Magento I talked to led me to believe…” and many people are worried that the Community Edition will be phased away.  Reality is, most of our small to mid customers are on the Community Edition and have absolutely no problems that the Enterprise Edition would solve.  And that’s great!  And all three Editions will be vital for Magento’s success, not too long ago it was one platform of which the development community embraced, and it was through that development community, and some brilliant folks at Magento, that the platform became the phenomenon it is today.

But don’t get me wrong here, I’m not advocating that no-one needs the Enterprise Edition, or that Magento’s a bad company for trying to sell the products that bring in revenue, but I am advocating that people learn about the differences themselves and make an informed decision.  It’s not like Magento is trying to hide it, or deceive people in any way, their website pretty clearly defines the differences – although having a column of red x’s in a competitive array usually means you’re trying to steer people away from that product.  I don’t want you to be the person that calls Blue Acorn, only to have us find out that you bought into the Enterprise Edition without real need, and wonder when sales are going to start rolling in – because it has happened.

To throw another variable in the mix now, we have the Professional Edition, which, now adds the much requested functionality of (I chuckle as I write this) gift cards and credits, as well as a higher level of encryption and loyalty system.  At a cost of $3K per year, you could probably justify that cost with those features alone, but because this was just launched I see this product maturing in product set and picking up several upcoming new features that will be specific to just the Professional and Enterprise Editions.  I believe that going forward, the Professional Edition will hit a sweet spot exactly for those companies that need a bit more than the Community Edition, without the Enterprise functionalities that really are only needed by larger corporations.   The following chart outlines the growth we’ve seen with the platform over the years, and the projected trajectory of each platform.  We’re using “growth” as an abstract metric in relative terms to each other.  This is not to scale, and doesn’t mean that the Community Edition is 50% of the Enterprise Edition – fact of the matter is they share the same code base and are probably about 80-90% the same.  This is meant to illustrate relative growth of the platforms in terms of enhancements, new features, marketing, sales, and overall attention given to each from Magento.  Although note that the Community involvement in maintaining the Community Edition; as Magento’s role in that platform has diminished to minimal involvement of the CAB and rolling in community contributed code to the core.

In the end, with any eCommerce platform you select to work with, you must perform the due diligence necessary to select a platform based around your needs, both today, and tomorrow.  We’re big advocates of Magento, and the introduction of the Professional Edition allows Magento to extend their reach into even more areas – all the way from small companies with limited budgets on the Community Edition, all the way to Enterprise behemoths with the Enterprise Edition.  Where you fit into the equation is sometimes a difficult question to answer, but always go back to your requirements – what do you need and how do these editions stack up to that?  Or, just give us a call, we’re glad to help!

SIDENOTE: it’s been a while since our last Magento post so I thought I’d mention that we are committed to writing more about Magento and how it can help online retailers.  There’s so many things we’ve done with the platform that we’d love to share, experiences and tips others can benefit from, and it is just a matter of finding the time in the day to get it all down in writing.  We’ve been so busy working with Magento that we haven’t had the time write about it!

A little over one year ago – a little eCommerce platform was released that revolutionized how businesses approach eCommerce – it’s name, Magento Commerce.  We had been following the development of Magento (for short) for quite some time, and had deep interest in working with that platform extensively.  Shortly after that day, we wrote up a brief Magento review based on our first impressions, and became a Magento Silver Partner.  The popularity of Magento skyrocketed, and since that original posting, we’ve had many follow up questions regarding many of the valid points we raised way back when.

After some training, a number of implementations, and some deep custom work with the application, we felt the need to share some of our experiences with the community.  While the existing eCommerce Blog on our site was a great opportunity to do so, we decided that the audience of that blog wouldn’t be as interested in Magento-specific issues.  So we’ve dedicated this part of our site for the Blue Acorn Magento Commerce Blog – specifically for Magento tips, techniques, customizations, and common issues.  We hope that this blog serves to help others find solutions to puzzling questions with Magento (trust us, there’s a lot of them), provide guidance for those administering the application, and discuss technical issues that arise from its implementation and customization (and free code samples to boot!).

So subscribe to the Magento blog feed, and participate in the discussion!