We recently wrote about 3 good reasons to consider the Magento Enterprise Edition for your business. Today, we wanted to expand a little more on what makes Magento Enterprise a great choice for your e-commerce business!
Magento Community, as many of you know, is a free, open-source, platform available to anyone on the Web. Its modular construction that’s plugin/extension-friendly and easy to upgrade makes it an ideal choice for any e-commerce website platform. Not only that, it’s designed for marketing, SEO and reporting, with options such as multiple storefronts, coupon codes, discount modules, cross-selling and upselling options.
Based on the success of the Magento Community platform (over 24,000 sites use it!), the folks at Magento developed Magento Enterprise Edition, an e-commerce platform that caters to the needs of larger clients.
Magento Enterprise
While similarly adaptable to the Community version, Magento Enterprise includes additional features that enhance reliability and security. The platform grows as you do, offering flexibility at the front-end, which allows delivering consistent brand experiences and reducing site maintenance. In short, It’s not just software!
Magento Enterprise comes with exclusive features that are grouped under specific themes:
- “Dynamic marketing and merchandising”, which includes visual merchandising, content management and customer segmentation.
- “Increased customer loyalty” through a reward points system, store credits, private sales, and more.
- “Powerful performance and scalability” with MySQL cluster support, multiple master servers to support checkout, order management, and product data.
- “Extensive management tools” such as enabling your users to get their Return Management Authorization (RMA) directly from your website and make their returns easier and faster. Google Tag Manager is also available, so you can track your audience, monitor your retargeting, search engine marketing and personalization.
- “Mobile”: The Magento Mobile Software Development Kit helps support all Magento features and offers sample apps that can be customized for enhanced development.
Of course, the best way to compare the two products is side-by-side, so check out the two tables below for an informed decision!
| Catalog | Small catalogs
< 5,000 products |
Medium and large catalogs
> 5,000 products |
| Indexing | Normal
|
Very fast (3 times faster than community)
|
| Page load time |
|
Very fast
|
| Tax calculation |
|
|
| Private sales
(for specific groups or segments of clients) |
Extension needed | Feature provided |
| Loyalty program
(Not refer a friend) |
Extension needed | Feature provided |
| Refer a friend | Extension needed | Feature “reward points” provided, but need customisation. |
| RMA
(return management authorization) |
Extension needed | Feature provided |
| Cross-sell / Up-sell / Recommended products | Manually for each product | Dynamic rules based product relations |
| Store credits | Extension needed | Feature provided |
| Multiple visits | Extension needed | Feature provided |
| Payment gateway |
|
|
| Backoffice |
|
|
| Support |
|
|
| Community | Enterprise | |
| Code-level access | ✩ | ✭ |
| Web Services API | ✩ | ✭ |
| Mobile HTML 5 theme pre-integrated | ✩ | ✭ |
| Extensions | ✩ | ✭ |
| API integration | ✩ | ✭ |
| Themes | ✩ | ✭ |
| Mobile stores | ✩ | ✭ |
| Multiple store views | ✩ | ✭ |
| Advanced administrator roles | ✩ | ✭ |
| Persistent shopping cart | ✩ | ✭ |
| Flexible pricing rules | ✩ | ✭ |
| Analytics and reporting | ✩ | ✭ |
| Layered navigation | ✩ | ✭ |
| International commerce and multiple languages | ✩ | ✭ |
| Shipping rules, payment configurations and gateways | ✩ | ✭ |
| Product configurations | ✩ | ✭ |
| Up-sells, cross-sells and related products | ✩ | ✭ |
| SEO | ✩ | ✭ |
| Flexible couponing and promotions | ✩ | ✭ |
| Customer accounts management | ✩ | ✭ |
| Order management | ✩ | ✭ |
| Advanced customer segmentation and targeting | ✭ | |
| Private sales, events, invitations | ✭ | |
| Gift registry and gifting options | ✭ | |
| Reward points | ✭ | |
| Advanced Return Management Authorization (RMA) | ✭ | |
| Staging, merging and rollback for content | ✭ | |
| Store credits | ✭ | |
| Enhanced catalog and content management system | ✭ | |
| Price and promotion permission | ✭ | |
| Full-page caching | ✭ | |
| Minimum advertised price | ✭ | |
| Call center with assisted shopping | ✭ | |
| Solr Search | ✭ | |
| Technical support | ✭ | |
| Built-in security | ✭ |
So, what do you think? Is your business ready for Magento Enterprise Edition?