Magento is rapidly taking the ecommerce world by storm and has already established itself as one of the leading ecommerce platforms in a very short space of time. There are three options for developing a Magento ecommerce site, namely:
- Magento Community Edition
- Magento Enterprise Edition
- Magento Professional Edition
We will concnetrate here upon the two most popular versions, the Community and Professional Editions.
Magento Community Edition
The Magento Community Edition is the free to use open-source version of the software. This is its main draw, but, it is not supported and needs a good level of knowledge to get the most from it. Typically it will be used by experienced ecommerce developers or expereinced in-house development teams.
There is a large support community and many thousands of additional modules have been developed to allow the platform to be customised in just about any way that an ecommerce owner could wish.
Magento Professional Edition
The Profesisonal edition as the name implies, means paying for it. And for the payment of $3,000 USD pa the site owner gets the following principle benefits:
- support from the parent company Magento
- gift certificates physical and virtual
- customer store credits
- rewards points
However, the site must be installed and developed through a Magento Professional Partner. For most stores the community version is sufficient and provides the optimum value.