28 June 2019
Magento is a market leading ecommerce platform used by hundreds of thousands of businesses of all sizes across the globe and is developed by the company of the same name (now part of the Adobe group). To provide you with an insight into the significance of Magento as an ecommerce platform consider this: it is currently employed by 19,627 websites in the United Kingdom alone (according to BuiltWith).
Speaking to existing clients and prospects, who are currently using M1, we’ve discovered that there is a great deal of confusion surrounding the differences between Magento 1 and Magento 2, and when or if they should upgrade. To help you make this decision we’ve outlined below the difference between the versions of Magento and the key benefits of upgrading to M2.
The most widely used version of Magento currently is Magento 1. The end of life for this product has been announced as June 2020 after which security support for this version won’t be provided by Magento. Planning well ahead, Magento collected feedback and invested heavily in research and development to produce new features to replace the M1 version. The feedback from the community and the new features produced by the Magento team were incorporated into the ecommerce platform to create its latest incarnation: Magento 2 (M2).
The M2 platform is already recognised as a top ecommerce system and is provided in two versions:
As M1 is being phased out, over time the wider Magento ecosystem will concentrate on developments for M2 as it becomes the most commonly used version of Magento, leaving users still on M1 with a smaller pool of developers and agencies to choose from and support them. We predict that this most likely will involve inflated rates being charged as a result for M1 support. The lack of security support from Magento also means that any fixes will have to be applied on an ad-hoc basis by a non-Magento third-party, so quality control will be an issue. Added to this, no new features have been added to M1 for the last couple of years i.e. since M2 was launched, so any innovations that have occured in the meantime are not in its core files. Magento 2 also runs natively on PHP 7.2 which offers significant security and speed advantages over the now obsolete PHP 5.6 that M1 runs on.
We have recently delivered a powerful M2 website for Alan Paine, a luxury knitwear and shooting retailer, migrating them successfully from Magento 1 to M2 (Open Source). We established a contemporary, fully responsive website for the retailer, with multiple storefronts to allow it to better engage with its overseas customers in the Americas, Europe and Sweden through Magento’s store switcher and geolocation functionality which alows autoselection of the stores for the users. Read more about how Alan Paine has succeeded using M2 here.
Although M2 is a extremely flexible and powerful system it is not the best fit for every business. If you find that M2 is too complex, you don’t require extensive third party (ERP) integrations, your online sales are on the smaller side and / or you just require a standardised user journey for a limited number of products, then we can also assist. In this scenario we can work with you to find more suitable alternatives. Find out more about our alternative ecommerce platform and how our clients have been able to achieve their goals.
Would you like to find out more about M2 and how you can employ the features of the system to improve your business or just simply want to see the system in action?
Then sign up for our Magento 2 webinar - ‘migrating to M2 - what I need to know’ where we will cover all of these points in detail.