Ecommerce Shakeups: Magento Acquisition and Etsy Rate Increases
By Steph Skardal
June 19, 2018
If you’ve been paying any attention to much in the ecommerce world, there have been a couple shakeups and transitions that could affect how you look at your ecommerce options these days.
Adobe to Acquire Magento
A few weeks ago, it was announced Adobe would acquire Magento in a large acquisition. We’ve seen Magento clients come and go. It used to be the case that the Magento Community version was free and open source, but lacking in features, and the Magento Enterprise version was not free and came with many more features but was closed source.
But, times change, and admittedly I haven’t looked into the current Magento offerings until writing this post. The two current options for Magento are Magento Commerce Starter and Magento Commerce Pro, more details here. These plans are not for small potatoes, starting at $2k/mo. I can see how the cost of this is worth it in lieu of paying a full time developer, but this is not a good fit for small businesses just getting started.
There at not many public details on the acquisition, other than bringing Magento to Adobe’s range of “physical and digital goods across a range of industries, including consumer packaged goods, retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and the public sector”. Only time will tell.
Etsy Hikes Rates
I am personally connected to the craft industry by way of my own hobby, so I’ve heard rumblings of the changes going on within Etsy with a new CEO throughout the last year. They will be shutting down Etsy wholesale as of July 31st, 2018, closing Etsy Studio & Manufacturing later this year, and last week, they announced increasing transaction fees from 3.5% to 5% which will now also apply to shipping charges. With that money, they will be offering improved tools and marketing efforts. You can read the official announcement here and more Q&A from Etsy here.
There are so many overwhelming options when it comes to determining what the best ecommerce solution is for any size of ecommerce business, and whether or not now is the right time to move away from Etsy. There is no one size fits all approach, and the best solution is very dependent on the company size and sales, in-house personnel and their skillset, structural organization, and so much more.
There are many competing SaaS options like Shopify, Big Commerce, Big Cartel, Squarespace. We’ve helped set up these software as a solution environments for many clients and they can be a great fit for business owners interested in offloading support and maintenance. In addition to SaaS options, WooCommerce in WordPress is the most popular open-source [free] solution, although many plugins and themes for it are not free. There are plenty of other open source ecommerce options out there, running on a web framework/language (Ruby on Rails, Django, MVC in PHP, etc.) of your choosing.
Conclusion
Like I mentioned above, finding the right solution is very circumstantial. I tend to suggest starting with a low-investment starting point for ecommerce, in whatever shape or form that takes for you, and then incrementally moving up if that’s what you need.
While Etsy might offer a nice low-investment starting point, more exposure and marketing tools, you ultimately aren’t building your own brand on your own domain. I have seen a handful of people in the craft industry keep their Etsy shop open for a specific audience but grow things on their own domain running on another SaaS platform.
On the flip side, many of End Point clients have businesses that are further along and the more enterprisey versions or custom software development solutions make great sense for them, with or without in-house development staff.
If you’re interested in finding out more about setting up a SaaS shop, moving away from Etsy, or understanding your options with Magento, contact us to find out how we can support your business goals.
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