“How much is it?”
This is a question everyone in the commerce world wants to know when considering implementation of anything new for business. But, using only cost to evaluate a product or service is a disservice to you and to your business. It completely undermines any time-saving benefits, ROI, and overall profitability the product or service would provide, meaning you might be missing out on something that could make a big difference for you.
That’s what can happen when you’re choosing the right platform for your ecommerce site. Once you settle on Magento as the platform to use, the question then moves to which version is right for you: Community or Enterprise? For some businesses, Community (and a team of talented developers) is more than enough; for others, Community becomes a roadblock to growth. For those businesses, Enterprise makes sense and is the best solution to handle their business load and growth.
Who Should Use Magento Enterprise:
1. You process tons and tons of orders.
If you run enough orders through your site, you’ll want (and probably need) increased security & encryption. Both of which come with using a PA-DSS certified payment application, like the Magento Secure Payment Bridge that comes included with Enterprise.
2. You have a huge inventory & a lot of rich media.
Your site needs to load fast. If it takes more than 3 seconds, your visitors are bouncing off of your site and straight onto a competitors. A large inventory and a lot of visual content makes for heavy pages and potentially slow load times. Magento Enterprise paired with an awesome hosting company means your heavy site loads lightning fast.
3. Your business is growing like crazy and/or your goal is to grow.
Magento is known for its flexibility and customizability; but, even the free version has its limits. As your business continues to grow, as well as your functionality needs, you will need the enhanced features that come with Enterprise in order to expand quickly and keep up with your business and your customers. Granted, you could have those enhanced features built for you, but Enterprise is much more cost-efficient. You get all the features, you’re in control, and you’re limitless, potentially all for less than you would have to pay to develop even one of the enhanced features you need.
Where You See ROI With Enterprise:
1. RMS (Rich Merchandising Suite)
The Rich Merchandising Suite includes segmentation, which allows you to:
- Personalize shopping experience
- Personalize offers & discounts
- Show better related products
- Restrict your catalog for flash sales & private sales
You can also create custom coupons specifically for various customer segments, products, categories, even dates & times.
2. Rule-based Cross-sells & Up-sells
Use rules to create product associations automatically and save time on catalogs of any size. Add this to insights gained from segmentation to offer the best, most personalized cross-sells and up-sells and to increase AOV (average order value).
3. Automated Email Marketing Reminders
With this feature, you can send emails to customers who abandoned their cart to re-engage them or to find out why they abandoned their cart. They’ll either come back to purchase from you or you’ll gain insight on how to reduce cart abandonment. Either way, you’re walking away from the interaction with something valuable. You could also send out wishlist reminders or notifications to bring people back to your site and up transactions.
4. Advanced Caching & Indexing
With full-page caching and better indexing techniques, Enterprise will reduce your site load times. That, plus the high performance architecture, means your visitors are more likely to stay on your site, which gives you the chance to present something worthwhile for continued engagement.
5. Loyalty/Rewards Programs
Your loyal customers are your most profitable customers. They have an ALV (average lifetime value), which means they come back to buy from you again and again. On top of that, they’ll bring referrals to you and, if you treat them well, they’ll become your brand advocates. Reward them for being awesome and you’ll be able to reap rewards too.
6. Magento Secure Payment Gateway (PA-DSS Compliance)
If you authorize enough orders, you’ll need a PA-DSS compliant system to help you maintain PCI Compliance - make your life so much easier with Magento Enterprise. The Enterprise platform includes the Magento Secure Payment Gateway; it’s PA-DSS certified and, when implemented correctly, it will allow you to maintain PCI compliance much more efficiently.
7. Testing/Staging Environment
You should always be testing and optimizing your site; you should also test any changes or new implementations you plan to make (and back up your site!) before any of it goes live. Sites break, updates cause issues, changes can have unplanned consequences – with Magento Enterprise, you don’t have to worry about it. You can test things before they go live in the staging environment in case something goes wrong.
These are just a few of the premium features available through Enterprise. Your business is unique. There is no doubt Magento would be able to support & showcase that uniqueness online, so if you have any questions about which version is the best fit for you, give us a call at 717-431-3330. We’ll be glad to chat about your business and provide more information to aid in your decision-making process.