( Source : http://magento.com/blog )
Magento’s two popular platforms, geared towards the small and medium sized businesses, shall be discontinued by February 1st, 2015.
Magento Go & Prostores have built a reputation of being the right choice for small and mid sized businesses. According to some popular internet sources, these two platforms work with a total of over 10,000 merchants.
The company has already clarified that the transition is not expected to disrupt the holiday shopping season for the associated merchants. In fact, Magento shall continue to support the merchants, using the platform, right till the 1st of February, 2015.
Reason for discontinuation
According to the news coming out, the reason for discontinuing these two products is Magento’s realignment policy where it aims to focus on its flagship products. The company is most renowned for its Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition. Both these products touch base with the larger merchants who need extensive features, service and support. While some of the existing Merchants associated with Magento Go and Prostores might be eligible to upgrade to these flagship products, many others might not have the desired level of operations to do the same.
Alongside, some company sources mentioned how Magento wanted to also focus its attention on developing next generation solutions. Magento 2 is in the pipeline and the company will need quite a few resources to be able to effectively serve all those customers that this new platform attracts. The discontinuation of Magento Go and Prostores does free up some resources that Magento can use for its flagship products and the futuristic Magento 2.
It is mentioned on Magento’s website of how this move is also geared towards ensuring that customers of all kinds receive the standard of service that need to develop a path breaking eCommerce existence. The article on the website clarifies that Magento will stay committed to serve its clients well and offer the highest plinth of service.
What next for the merchants?
The merchants who currently use the two platforms being discussed aren’t left in complete disarray either. Magento is going an extra mile to ensure that they receive all the service to smoothly migrate to Magento’s flagship products or to other eCommerce providers.
The company has developed migration centers for the two platforms’ merchants. These migration centers contain checklists, planning resources, and special offers for the customers to make a seamless transition.
Those mediums sized customers who were anyway looking for improved customer service might wish to upgrade to Magento’s flagship products. They might select one of the two products depending upon their needs and requirements. However, not all merchants will be comfortable to upgrade to these high end platforms. For those merchants, Magento has affiliated with BigCommerce to help them make a smooth move. The company expects to offer its merchants with service based SaaS solutions from BigCommerce that provide similar characteristics to the ones that the merchants are used to. This transition to BigCommerce is completely free for the merchants and that does come as a sense of relief for many customers of the two platforms.
If the merchants do not want to either upgrade to Magento’s flagship products or transition to BigCommerce, they might even decide to make a transition to the other eCommerce providers.
