What is Magento e-commerce platform?

There are over 250,000 merchants powered by Magento. Merchant growth is calculated to about 3 times more on average by using this platform. Magento is the most highly customizable eCommerce platform out there. It is a very robust system even at its most basic community version.

Magento Open Source: 

It’s open source with over 150,000 developers contributing and the Magento Open Source version is free to download, customize and self-host.

Magento Commerce:  This is the enterprise edition of the Magento platform.  Magento Commerce has a license fee that starts at $28,000 per year. Magento Commerce can be hosted on-premise or on the cloud. The Commerce version has all the features of the Community version and more.

magento front end

Magento Open Source Vs Magento Commerce Features & Capabilities Comparison

Built-In Features Magento Open Source Magento Commerce Magento Commerce

Integrated Checkout, Payment, and Shipping

 X X

Includes more payment sources for greater flexibility.

Mobile Optimized Shopping

 X X

Provides an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices (from desktop to mobile phones).

Global Selling

 X X

Provides ability to transact in multiple countries, currencies, and use worldwide shipping providers.

Catalog Management

 X X

Manages the creation of rich content across many types of products: simple, configurable, bundled, and customer-personalized.

Extended Functionality via App Marketplace

 X X

Easily add capabilities and connectors for a nominal fee using the Magento Extensions Marketplace.

Instant Purchase

 X X

Provides returning customers with a faster checkout experience.

Site Search

 X X

Comes with Elasticsearch, which delivers high quality search results that help boost conversion rates.

Business Intelligence Dashboards

 X

Learn more about your customers with advanced reporting tools and over 100 ready-to-use reports.

Integrated B2B Functionality

 X

Access advanced B2B capabilities like quoting, custom catalogs, and company accounts.

Advanced Marketing Tools

 X

Create custom promotions and merchandising tactics for your customer groups.

Content Staging and Preview

 X

Create, schedule, and review site changes faster and more accurately with built-in staging and preview features.

Customer Loyalty Tools

 X

Includes built-in tools for enabling reward points, gift registries, wish lists, and exclusive private sales events.

WYSIWYG Page Builder

 X

Includes a built-in enhanced content management system (CMS) with drag and drop interface.

Visual Merchandising

 X

Enables merchants to organize products on catalog pages dramatically faster and easier. Sort by most popular sales items and more with the
click of a mouse.

Optimized Cloud Commerce
for Magento

 X

A cloud environment that is optimized for Magento so there is one less thing to manage when rolling out your online store.

Global Availability

 X

Easily deploy your shopping sites globally.

Cloud availability SLA up to 99.99%

 X

SLA covers availability of servers and supporting services.

Fast Page Loading with Content Delivery Network (CDN)

 X

Content Delivery Network (CDN) is always-on and ready to handle any traffic during peak periods (including Black Friday and Christmas). Achieve faster page loading performance for your users, enabling increased sales conversion rates, SEO, and a reduced website bounce rate.

Performance Monitoring Tools

 X

Get real-time data about your site’s performance with application performance monitoring (APM).

Enhanced Security with Fastly WAF and DDoS Services.

 X

Protect your store with advanced security.

PCI Compliant

 X

Important if your company intends to accept card payments, and store, process, and transmit cardholder data.

Easy Deployment

 X

Get to market faster with pre-integrated cloud services.

Streamlined Updates and Testing

 X

Immediately benefit from continuous infrastructure upgrades, performance enhancements and patches.

Account Manager

 X

Dedicated account manager to oversee overall relationship.

Technical Support

 X

24/7 technical support with a real person.

Access to Quick Design-Build Express Packages

 X

Express packages offered by Certified Magento Partners, offer quick-launch, low cost implementation solutions for merchants just getting started.

Magento Open Source Features

Magento Community powerful features that will help you rapidly grow your online store.

MARKETING, PROMOTIONS, AND CONVERSION TOOLS

• Set related products, up-sells, and cross-sells
• Set promotional pricing for specific stores, categories, customer groups, or products
• Create flexible coupons for specific stores, customer groups, time periods, products, and categories
• Export coupon codes for offline distribution, email, newsletters, and more
• Track and report coupon usage
• Set multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts
• Get minimum advertised price (MAP) support
• Offer free shipping options
• Bundle products
• Create customizable category landing pages
• Show recently viewed and compared products
• Showcase new items with dynamic new product lists
• Save unpurchased items for the shopper’s next visit with persistent shopping cart
• Create newsletters and manage their distribution
• Add Facebook, Twitter, and email links for sharing products

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

• Automatically generate a Google sitemap
• Create search engine friendly URLs
• Take full control of URLs with URL rewrites
• Create metadata for products, categories, and content pages

SITE MANAGEMENT

• Control multiple websites and stores from one administration panel
• Define roles and permissions to control access to administrative features
• Use the content management system to create and easily edit pages and content blocks
• Choose from a wide variety of templates that are 100% customizable
• Get support for multiple languages and currency
• Set tax rate based on location, product type, or customer group (i.e., wholesale vs. retailer)
• Use a Web Services API for easy integration between Magento and third-party applications
• Batch import and export catalog and customer information
• Add CAPTCHA functionality to help prevent automated software from attempting fake logins

CATALOG MANAGEMENT

• Display simple, configurable (e.g., choose size, color, etc.), bundled, and grouped products
• Display virtual products
• Include downloadable/digital products with samples
• Define unlimited product attributes
• Create pre-defined attribute sets for quick product creation
• Easily manage inventory with support for backordered items
• Receive notification when inventory needs to be replenished
• Choose out-of-stock messaging and display options
• Define minimum and maximum product quantities that can be added to the cart
• Mass-assign a value to multiple products for batch updates to products
• Automatically resize images and include watermarking
• Use advanced pricing rules and get support for special prices, customer group prices, and tiered pricing
• Rewrite and redirect search results if customers are searching and receiving no results
• Moderate reviews and product tags
• Allow customer personalized products – upload images and text for monogramming, etc.

CATALOG BROWSING

• Filter products in categories and search results by price range, brands, color swatches, and other attributes with layered/faceted navigation
• View product category items in grid or list format
• View product comparisons with history
• Display a recently viewed products module
• Add breadcrumbs
• Define search synonyms to expand search results
• Add a popular search terms cloud

PRODUCT BROWSING

• View multiple images per product
• Zoom-in on product images
• Include swatches to show colors, fabrics, and more
• Set related products, up-sell, and cross-sell
• Display stock availability
• Show pricing tiers
• Show product option selection
• Include grouped products view
• Include option to add product to wish list
• Add Facebook, Twitter, and email links for sharing products

CHECKOUT, PAYMENT AND SHIPPING

• Use one-page checkout
• Use guest and registered user checkout
• Ship to multiple addresses in one order
• Add option for account creation at beginning of checkout
• Get SSL security support for orders on both front-end and back-end
• Save shopping cart
• Accept gift messages per order and per item
• Show tax and shipping estimates in the shopping cart
• Save credit card method for offline payments
• Authorize and charge upon shipment or checkout
• Integrate with multiple PayPal gateways
• Integrate with Authorize.net
• Accept checks and money orders
• Accept purchase orders
• Get additional payment extensions through Magento Connect
• Select PayPal Credit as a payment option
• Integrate shipping with label printing for all major carriers
• Receive real-time shipping rates from UPS, UPS XML(account rates), FedEx (account rates), USPS, and DHL
• Specify allowed destination countries based on shipping method
• Set flat rate shipping per order or item
• Set table rates for weight, price, destination, and number of items
• Provide free shipping
• Provide on-site order tracking from customer accounts

ORDER MANAGEMENT

• View, edit, create, and fulfill orders and/or invoices from the admin panel
• Create multiple invoices, shipments and credit memos per order to allow for split fulfillment
• Print invoices, packing slips, and shipping label
• Enable customer service representatives to create orders and customer accounts, and update products and coupons in customers’ shopping carts and wish lists
• Receive email notifications and RSS feeds with order status
• Create custom order status labels to track progress

CUSTOMER ACCOUNTS

• View comprehensive account dashboard
• Choose default billing and shipping addresses
• Include address book with unlimited addresses
• See order status and history
• Allow re-ordering from account
• View recently ordered items
• Include sharable wish list
• Manage newsletter subscriptions
• View product reviews submitted
• View product tags submitted
• Access downloadable/digital products

CUSTOMER SERVICE

• Use Contact Us form
• Create and edit orders from the admin panel
• Provide feature-rich customer accounts
• See order history with status updates
• View order tracking from account
• Create customizable transactional emails for order status, account updates, password resets, and more

INTERNATIONAL SUPPORT

• Receive support for localization, multiple currencies, and local tax rates
• Receive support for accented characters and right-to-left text
• Get product with six translations (French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese)
• All possible languages supported
• Configure list of allowed countries for site registration, shipping, and billing
• Support fixed product taxes, such as WEEE/DEEE in the EU
• Automatically calculate tax for transactions in the EU with VAT-ID validation2
• Use EU cookie notification to simplify EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive compliance

ANALYTICS AND REPORTING

• Receive support for Google Universal Analytics
• Access the following reports through the admin dashboard:
– Sales report
– Tax report
– Abandoned shopping cart report
– Best viewed products report
– Best purchased products report
– Low stock report
– Search terms report
– Product reviews report
– Tags report
– Coupon usage report
– Total sales invoiced report
– Total sales refunded report

MOBILE COMMERCE

Responsive Design
• Quickly create a site optimized for any device using an included base responsive design reference theme

The responsive design:
– Can be easily customized for a faster time to market
– Includes all major flows, product types, and features
– Reduces long-term maintenance costs and eases site updates
– Offers SEO benefits by using Google’s preferred approach to optimize mobile sites
– Enables customers to read notifications and promotional mailing on mobile devices through responsive emails and newsletters

Magento Ecommerce Admin

Magento Commerce Features

Magento Commerce version includes the core features above and more powerful features that will help you rapidly grow your business from startup to enterprise businesses.

PAGE BUILDER AND CONTENT STAGING

Increase sales and productivity by enabling your business teams to easily create, preview, and schedule a content updates
without involving IT. Combine text, images, video, sliders, and more in flexible layouts and an easy drag & drop interface.
Preview all changes by date or store view to guarantee a flawless shopper experience and optimize the timing and impact
of site updates by managing all changes through a timeline dashboard. Automatically deploy updates at scheduled times
for greater efficiency.

CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION AND PERSONALIZATION

Create personalized shopping experiences that boost conversion rates by dynamically displaying content, promotions,
and pricing to specific customers based on properties such as their location, gender, order history, lifetime purchase value,
wish list items, and more. You can also target unknown site visitors based on the products they have viewed or items in
their cart.

DYNAMIC RULE-BASED PRODUCT RELATIONS

Set automated rules to determine which products to present as up-sells, cross-sells, and related products to each
customer segment. Rules are easily administered through a condition-based tool allowing you to effortlessly target
product suggestions to increase sales and average order values.

INSTANT PURCHASE

Boost conversion rates for returning shoppers with a new Instant Purchase checkout option. Customers can use
previously-stored payment credentials and shipping information to skip checkout steps, making the process faster and
easier, especially for mobile shoppers.

VISUAL MERCHANDISING

Optimize product category pages to drive higher sales by arranging products with a simple drag-and-drop interface or
sorting rules that order products by best seller, color, highest margin, or newest addition. Save time by setting rules to
automatically assign products to specific categories based on their attributes, such as brand, price, or date created.

POWERFUL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE CAPABILITIES

Harness your data to drive growth by empowering your teams with capabilities. Easily access and analyze your Magento
data and any other data source to gain a 360-degree view of your business. Evaluate marketing ROI, retention efforts,
conversion rates and more, as you learn more about your customers.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN THEMES

Quickly create a website optimized for any device by leveraging built-in responsive design reference themes. The
responsive themes adapt and adjust how menus, images, checkout and other features are displayed to fit desktop, laptop,
tablet, and mobile device screens. Themes are touch-friendly, easily customized, and offer SEO advantages.

PROGRESSIVE WEB APPLICATION (PWA) STUDIO

Magento PWA Studio enables merchants and developers to create reliable, fast and engaging mobile experiences to boost
conversion rates and increase engagement. Deliver app-like capabilities like rich visuals perfectly tailored to the small
screen, usability with limited network connectivity, and access to native push notifications. Speed time to market and
lower the total cost of ownership with reference themes, guided development, open web standards.

INTEGRATED B2B FUNCTIONALITY

Transform your business buyer experience to increase loyalty, reduce costs, and drive new growth. Empower your
business customers with the ability create company accounts, set up multiple buyers, and define their specific roles
and responsibilities with easy self-service tools. Create custom catalogs and price lists to ensure buyers receive contract
terms when purchasing online and offer payments on account to increase sales. Fast, friction-free purchasing with quick
order forms, requisition lists, and a streamlined request for quote workflow encourages repeat purchases and long-term
customer loyalty.

INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

Improve operational efficiency with integrated multi-source inventory and shipping management capabilities. Assign
and track products across multiple locations and set business rules to control when to fulfill orders from each location to
prevent stockouts and speed delivery.

POWERFUL ADMIN EXPERIENCE

Work efficiently with a modern and intuitive user interface. A dashboard lets you monitor your business with quick
access to sales, order, search term and best-selling product data. Enhanced navigation and search make it easy to find
information, and management screens can be customized and saved to speed up day-to-day tasks.

TECHNICAL AND ACCOUNT SUPPORT

Benefit from a team of experts dedicated to helping you succeed. Magento Technical Support is available 24×7 to help you
quickly resolve technical issues and questions, and dedicated Account Managers get to know your business so that they
can point you to the right resources and help you get the most out of your Magento platform.

CLOUD INFRASTRUCTURE

Focus on growing your business rather than managing your IT infrastructure. The Magento Commerce cloud provides
a reliable cloud-based environment designed to support any Magento store deployment. With high availability and
scalability, and top performance delivered by a high-speed CDN and performance management tools, you can deliver the
experience your customers demand.