Is Magento Enterprise a must for larger sites (10K+ SKUs and 25K+ visitors per day)?

May 28th, 2015

We're working with a startup that is migrating from an old custom ecommerce platform to Magento. They are considering using Community Edition, but since they're traffic is already high and they have a lot of SKUs (10k and growing), not to mention they're investing in marketing, we think Enterprise may be the better option. Is there a good argument for Community Edition?

Anthony Zeoli Digital Strategy and WordPress Consultant and Trainer

May 29th, 2015

Andy,

I can put you in touch with RailsDog, a big Spree Ecommerce agency I work with, if you're interested in getting some good info on that platform.

Tom Tsatsos San Francisco Bay Area Ecommerce Professional

May 28th, 2015

If spending the $15,550/yr is cost prohibitive for your startup, one option is to start with Magento Community and upgrade to Enterprise on an as-needed basis. Enterprise offers a lot of bells and whistles that you may not even need, and most of those are available as commercial or free extensions. Even features like Full Page Caching can be purchased and set up in Magento Community.

Now, there are definitely some nice features in Enterprise that make it easier to maintain. For instance, it includes an integrated roll back/back up system that makes it easy to revert to a previous version in case your latest deployment goes awry.

There are plenty of articles online that compare Community vs. Enterprise - it would be good to prioritize your immediate and future needs against the capabilities of Enterprise to gauge whether you need it in the short run.

Vlad Fratila Magento Developer at Rocket Web Inc

May 29th, 2015

Magento CE can be just as good as EE with the right performance tweaks, but this means getting a good agency to make sure that your site can meet a certain standard. You already have numbers, so you should request a performance test for the finished implementation, and account for a few sprints that include performance improvements. EE can be bogged down by bad code/setup just as well, so taking the time to test will yield better results.

Feature-wise, I'd say look at the features of EE and if there's something you need for launch, and can't find a 3rd party module that does it, it may make sense to go EE, as custom development tends to cost more.

Re: shopify, it costs way less but has limitations. It's a good proposition for those starting out but there's a point where you need the flexibility to edit code, or tweak performance, or adding unique features. One example is multi-currency, which Shopify can't do (afaik).

Kimberly Salzer Chief Marketing Officer at Hyperloop One

May 28th, 2015

I ran Gifts.com and we were good with Community for the forseeable future, even with large product catalog growth. Re: the Shopify question, they can't scale as well, especially when requiring customization features on your product catalog.

helloandyhihi

May 29th, 2015

It sounds like you've already invested in Magento but I've never seen a Magento site that I liked. They always seems sluggish to me, too. I'm really curious about Spree Commerce.

The Bonobos founder liked Spree Commerce so much that he switched from Magneto to that platform and invested in the company. It's also used by Blue Bottle.

https://spreecommerce.com

Patrick Colmenar Development Manager at LDProducts

May 29th, 2015

Our site is Magento EE based - http://www.ldproducts.com/. We are looking at CE for some smaller projects. It took a good few months of work optimizing the site. As with all sites, a critical component is how you cache your site. Either a CDN like Verizon Edgecast, Akamai or Amazon's Cloudfront or a software solution like Varnish can speed up any site.

matt matt Web Developer

May 28th, 2015

Good question Sent from my iPhone

Ron Peled Tech cofounder & CTO @ Educents

May 28th, 2015

It really depends on their budget and future plans. Magento CE can support a lot of growth. They also want to consider their future plans if they are pure eCommerce type company you are likely to benefit from getting on Magento Enterprise, otherwise if they need lots of customizations they will benefit from sticking with Magento CE and finding a good team to help them develop these custom features for their startup.

I've worked on several projects that have reached 10x the numbers you are referring and still were using Magento CE and it is true you can always upgrade later.

Vlad Fratila Magento Developer at Rocket Web Inc

May 29th, 2015

@andy Spree is starting to shape up, but it's very limited in features compared to Magento.

I'm thinking that whoever invests in Spree, does so because of Wombat and its potential (https://wombat.co/, it's their stellar integration layer).

If you find that you need just an eCommerce front-end, and you want most backend stuff in other systems, you may get better results with Spree + Wombat than with anything else. On the other hand, you can use Wombat with Magento as well.

In Magentoland, perfornance varies, that's true. I've built slow sites, and I've built sites handling 3-5 orders per second, while Catalog pages served instantly. There is much more to placing an order than the php or ruby code

http://www.magestack.com/ for example says they serve certain pages in as low as 8ms - and I believe them.

Anthony Zeoli Digital Strategy and WordPress Consultant and Trainer

May 28th, 2015

Hey David,

Reach out to Isaiah Bollinger at Trellis in Boston. He's a Magento expert and can possibly help you with this decision. Not sure if he's on here.

isaiah@growwithtrellis.com

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