With the new year upon us, our ecommerce team recently took a deep-drive into making comprehensive updates to our key white papers focused on Magento 2, Shopify, Shopify Plus, and BigCommerce ecommerce platforms.
Since the 2017 release of our ecommerce white papers, a great deal has changed in the industry and we recognized the need to update our core white papers on the ecommerce platform landscape. We dove into granular detail on Magento 2, Shopify, and BigCommerce to make sure they were updated with the latest publicly-available information and all include sections covering everything from catalog organization to available third-party integrations and pricing philosophy.
Here are some highlights from some of the key changes across the industry that we're now accounting for:
- Magento Changes Post-Adobe Acquisition - with the acquisition of Magento by Adobe in mid 2018, we're finally starting to see some of the impact of the acquisition carry through to the Magento 2 platform. In addition to significant investments in their support offerings (especially on their Cloud product), Adobe has both simplified their version/security patch updates and continues to pack more functionality, bug fixes, and performance improvements into each. With this, and almost singular focus on its paid offering, we continue to see narrowing fit for its Open Source in the industry when compared with SaaS solutions.
- SAAS Investment - Both Shopify and BigCommerce have both invested heavily in going after the perceived lower-end of the Magento market. They've rolled out feature-set, from better support for multiple storefronts to expansion of accepted currencies and capability to customize functionality via more robust APIs. As a result, the growth of both of these platforms is significant in the market.
- Pricing - While Shopify and BigCommerce have tweaked their pricing a bit, some of the bigger changes have come out of Adobe's changes to Magento Commerce (aka what used to be Magento Enterprise) pricing. The big story there is that — in what is likely a bid to make a more apples-to-apples comparison with SaaS solutions out there — Adobe has made the pricing of their Commerce Cloud and self-hosted Commerce versions the same. Magento 2's cloud offering was always pretty aggressive compared with a similarly-configured cloud hosting stack with related services, but this reinforces Adobe's corporate push for more robust cloud offerings and removes a key reason for why customers might want to self-host their Magento Commerce website.
With all that in mind, here are our updated white papers for you to check out and download: