Magento Go says goodbye and what you can do if you run a store there

Magento Go is shutting down on February 1, 2015

There was an interesting development on the e-commerce market while I enjoyed my overseas trip: 1st of July eBay/Magento announced that they are shutting done Magento Go – a cloud version of Magento eCommerce platform.  So now visitors of MagentoGo page  may observe the picture you can see above and get the information about migration from MagentoGo to other e-commerce platforms.

It is reported that circa 10,000 merchants are affected and while they have some time for migration (till 01 February 2015) I bet it isn’t a pleasant news for MagentoGo store owners. After you carefully selected e-commerce platform, spent time, money and effort to create design, put the products images and descriptions, connected payment gateways, found and installed extensions for extra functionality, integrated external systems and fine-tuned the whole beast through endless rounds of improvements you are not so keen to do it again, at least if you are more or less happy with your online shop. Admittedly Magento Go isn’t a system where you can do complex customization, but on the other hand the target market here is small businesses, so for many of them investments in their existing store should be pretty significant.

What are the pathways for the merchants affected? They have several alternatives for migration:

• Other Magento products, specifically Magento CE (Community Edition). Another product that Magento supports (Enterprise Edition) as it’s name suggest can be hardly considered as a replacement. Migration to Magento CE looks like most obvious way for affected store owners. Apparently going this way they may save the most of the store (design, database, extensions), while I am sure that it isn’t that easy and some tweaking will be required. However, while Magento CE is one of the best in class e-commerce system it has significant downside – much higher cost of support and maintenance. Only adequate hosting of the online store can cost more than Magento Go monthly fee.
• Another cloud platform. Magento suggests BigCommerce as their partner of choice. They propose a pathway and a special conditions for migrants. Another competitor, Shopify also offers incentive for MagentoGo clients. While for most merchants this way should be less expensive in long run than running Magento CE store, it will require more efforts to migrate and more things to change – starting from the design, that very unlikely can be completely replicated due to different architecture of the systems to extensions that can be unique for MagentoGo. Also the merchants here are losing one of the important opportunity (probably for many it was the main reason to select MagentoGo) – comparatively easy pathway to upgrade if/when the business overgrows SMB oriented cloud solution. Every soldier carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack and every online merchant dreams to be a second Amazon, right? Unfortunately moving to another cloud solution diminishes that opportunity.

So the choice isn’t easy and depends on your circumstances, plans and budget.

Stay tuned to my blog, I plan to write a follow-up post about why eBay decided to shut-down MagentoGo.

Update: this post is written, you are welcome to read it – https://levashov.biz/ebay-kills-magentogo/

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