Magento Enterprise or Magento Community: Which Suits Your Business?

Magento is a fantastic e-commerce platform that offers a range of benefits for businesses and customers. However, with two editions to choose from, Magento Enterprise and Magento Community, which one is best for your business?

If you are a business that sells a product or a service, you will need to cater your website towards your target audience. But how do you know which category they belong to? It’s important to understand the difference between B2C and B2B customers as your business strategy and the way you conduct business will be different for each group. 

B2C and B2B: Knowing the Difference

A lot of your e-commerce web development and marketing strategies will depend on this key difference.

For example, the selling process is typically less labor intensive with B2C customers, however B2C marketers need to be more careful how they pitch their services to B2C customers. Once the customer converts though, the process becomes quite predictable and straightforward.

This is because customers have more or less the same purchase behaviour decisions. Most of the customer’s purchase decisions are standalone and do not require any follow-up or aftercare.

A B2C customer tends to make all purchasing decisions from the heart and not from the head. Customers looking for a straightforward and simple approach. Not a complex one. According to market research, brands that offer simple brand experience are revealed to prosper by 62%.

Therefore, it’s a one-size-fits-all approach. B2C web developers need to make sure that the entire process from conversion to retention feels safe and secure. A clear direction throughout the customer’s buying journey is therefore needed.

B2B customers, on the other hand, approach an e-commerce website differently. Their purchase decisions appear to be logical and methodical. These customers will carefully go through your services and ensure that all the checkboxes in their list are ticked. Besides, a B2B customer will feedback to more than one person as with most businesses, there are usually more people involved in a purchase and the decision making.

The person who requires a service might not be the same person who is purchasing your product. In the case of B2B, every step, starting from making a request, sending approval and paying for the product, is done by different people at different stages.

B2B customers do not make any stand-alone decisions when it comes to purchasing. Hence, it’s not the emotion that is going to rule here. Websites need to concentrate more on providing customers useful information instead of flashy designs that will make parts of the website stand out from the crowd.

B2B customers are generally ‘repeat’ customers with big orders. Therefore, an ecommerce website catering to B2B customers will need to work on well-tailored communication skills that make them feel informed, valued and secured.

Features like customer log-ins and aftercare are extremely important here.

As you can see, B2B is different from B2C. How does your business cater to these different individual needs?

Boost Your Customer Experience with Magento Dedicated Solutions

Apart from Magento Go, which can be used by both B2C and B2B, there are two solutions that Magento has to offer. These are:

• Magento Community – This solution is great for mid-market merchants who seek leveraged extensions and custom codes that will help them to meet up to their customer extensions. It’s ideal for B2C businesses if you want to exercise improved control over your market presence.  
• Magento Enterprises – As the name indicates, Magento Enterprises offers rich software solution with improved enterprise capabilities and performance, making it ideal for B2B businesses.

The type of Magento solution you choose will also depend on the level of support that you will need, as the difference between the levels of support is quite significant.

• Support

Magento Enterprise comes with a full-time staff support, which provides stability to an organization during major crises, such as a need for emergency assistance or falling out with a partner.

Magento Community, on the other hand, does not offer any such kind of full-time community support to an organization. It lacks any type of targeted response that might be necessary when certain crises arrive.

Despite the differences, both the versions have their own advantages and disadvantages when it comes to ecommerce support. Check out the table below to identify what type of support would work best for your business:

Ref link – https://www.unleashed-technologies.com/blog/2014/02/26/magento-community-vs-enterprise-which-solution-fits-your-business

• Performance Enhancement

Another important factor that differentiates both is in terms of performance enhancement. There are a few notable advantages that the Magento Enterprises enjoys over Magento Community. For example, ever since the release of Magento Enterprise version 1.13, the platform is said to reindex 80% faster and significantly better compared to Magento Community.

Magento Enterprise is capable of handling a very large product catalog that Magento Community cannot.

There are a lot of processes that a new product information, when added, has to undergo in Magento. While in the case of Magento Community, the entire process could take as long as 10 – 20 minutes, it is instantaneous in the case of Magento Enterprise.

• Features

Compared to Magento Community Edition, the Enterprise Edition has many advanced features, such as:

• Streamlined Checkout Process
• Advanced Segmentation
• Customer Attribute Management
• Cross Sell/Upsell Management
• Robust Rollback
• Gift Wrapping/ Online Gift Cards/ Loyalty Rewards
• RMA System
• Marketing Segmentation Features

Choosing Between the Two

Magento Enterprise no doubt has more robust solutions to provide compared to Magento Community. However, the price has always been an important factor when it came to choosing the final one. If this is the case, then you can convert your simple Magento website into a robust one by incorporating the key features like –

• Multi-channel Support

This feature is essential if a business is trying to manage more than one business account. This is essential for both B2B and B2C portals

• Improved Bulk Ordering

A robust order interface will allow users to quickly upload a list of previous orders, SKUs, requisition list, recurring purchases, and reorders.

The feature also allows streamlining of the bulk orders based on per unit costs, bulk pricing tiers, discounts and order size ranges.

• Master Inventory Management

This feature gives the ability to track inventory across multiple locations, which makes it easy for business clients in their inventory management right from drop-shipping to scheduled delivery.

• Robust Account Management

With this feature, vendors can manage their client accounts by creating tiered users and customers, as well as setting down roles and permissions

Apart from this, other features include – detailed view of history orders, add and delete users, allow different customer groups to buy certain products, etc.

• Order Quotes and Price Negotiations

Create a complete built-in workflow by requesting business to business price negotiations and order quotes.

The Rock Bottom

You need to make sure that the third party features are better off than the built-in features. But most important of all, you need to make sure that the edition you choose suits your company wants and needs.

If you have any questions about Magento, why not give us a call! We have almost a decades worth of experience and our technical director is Magento certified!