A big shift occurred on Monday in the ecommerce platform space - Adobe announced the purchase of Magento! This news came out of nowhere and will impact several different fronts in the ecommerce space.
For ecommerce businesses the main things to know are:
- Magento features are unlikely to see large changes in the near-term
- Adobe Experience Cloud will be a strong digital option for medium-to-large businesses
- Shopify and BigCommerce will have to work even harder to expand beyond their core small business customer base
Let's break it down further:
What Is Experience Cloud?
The incredibly well-known Adobe Creative Cloud (hello Photoshop) has a less well-known younger sibling: Adobe Experience Cloud. The Experience Cloud is Adobe's suite of tools designed for Enterprise Solutions-level digital companies - think email marketing, data analytics, personalisation, programmatic advertising and more.
Adobe bills the Experience Cloud as a one-stop-shop for building your customers' digital experiences. But a lot of your customers, well, buy things online. With the purchase of Magento, Adobe has filled that gap in their portfolio.
Magento is a leading ecommerce platform for medium and Enterprise Solutions-level businesses. With Magento 2 and the Magento Commerce Cloud, they have been making strong moves to expand their lead in this segment.
Impact
Shopify & BigCommerce
This move may put a damper on the growth of Shopify and BigCommerce into the middle and top tier of ecommerce businesses.
In the past year or so BigCommerce and Shopify have both been making a big push into the medium-sized business market. With the gap between those two SaaS platforms and Magento narrowing, Magento was losing a bit of market share (though this is notoriously difficult to measure).
Aligning Magento within Adobe's suite of offerings will provide strong added value to organizations looking for a complete, robust set of digital tools.
Other Enterprise Solutions Solutions
If this was a defensive move on Magento's part - and that is still debatable - this was definitely an offensive move by Adobe. The Experience Cloud will be more competitive against other large players such as Salesforce, SAP, IBM and Oracle.
Creative Cloud Users
There is no near-term impact, but further down the road we may see tighter integration along the build process between Creative Cloud and Magento/Experience Cloud. This could play out in areas such as seamless publishing from Creative Cloud through to Magento templates - one can hope!
Further Analysis
For the past several years Magento has been owned by a private equity group. So while the products Magento has been putting out have been good, we think there will be room for improvement now that Magento is moving to a large, natively-digital company like Adobe.
Who Should be Most Excited About This?
Companies making $20 million annually or more who have complex digital needs. This move will provide a broad suite of digital tools under one umbrella, backed by deep pockets and technical know-how.
Anyone who has had to use twelve different tools to run their online business appreciates the process improvements, time-saving, and reduced development costs that come from using a set of tools from a single vendor.
If you have more questions about Magento, improving your ecommerce business, or anything else digital - contact us!