7 Warning Signs It’s Time To Upgrade To Magento Commerce 

What are the sweetest words you can hear when renting a car?

“We’ve upgraded you for free.”

Yes!

Instead of the Chevy Spark you reserved, you’re now sitting pretty in your Lincoln MKS.

Oh yeah.

And you can do a lot more with your Lincoln:

• Voice-activated dual-zone front automatic air conditioning.
• Heated and cooled leather seats.
• Door mirrors and steering wheel memory settings.

Oh yeah.

It’s the same idea upgrading from Magento Open Source to Commerce.

Bottom line? You can do a lot more.

But how do you know if you’re ready to upgrade to Commerce? What are the signs that it’s time to upgrade? 

In this article, we’ll be taking a look at seven common signs that it might be time to upgrade from Open Source to Magento Commerce, which has the features and tools you need to take your business to the next level.

1. You’re Having Trouble Handling an Influx of Visitors

Talk about a great problem to have, right?

Who wouldn’t want more visitors?!

Well…if your website can’t handle the traffic, that horde of visitors will leave your site en masse as quickly as they entered.

And that’s what you don’t want.

As your website becomes more popular and you begin to sell more items, you’ll find that you have more simultaneous visitors. If you’re Open Source, having too many people shopping on your site at once can strain your servers.

Crashes, slow performance, broken pages, and other issues are common if your servers aren’t ready to handle the load – and all of these issues can result in lost sales. 

Of course, you could just upgrade your servers and web hosting for better performance. But that’s like putting a band-aid over a gaping wound. Magento Commerce, on the other hand, has caching features and built-in cloud hosting that help improve your overall performance, and eliminate slowdowns caused by a large volume of traffic.

If you’re having trouble keeping up with your website’s growth, it may be time to switch.

2. Your Databases are Slowing Down 

One of the best features of Magento Commerce is that is has built-in support for split databases.

With split databases, you can “split” each of your major databases into separate entities. This means you could have separate databases for every different part of your website, including:

• Checkout 
• Product information
• Blogging and content hosting
• Customer logins

This allows you to optimize each database for speed and update them or maintain them separately, leading to better overall scalability and ease-of-administration. 

3. You Want A Better Search Experience 

One of the best features of Magento Commerce is that it uses a much more robust search engine – Elasticsearch – by default.

Compared to the search engine used by Open Source, this search engine is more powerful and customizable, allowing you to provide customers with a better search experience.

Here are 3 tell-tale signs that your search tools may need to be overhauled include:

1. Visitors dropping out of the sales funnel for no apparent reason
2. Site visitors making use of search, but failing to convert and make a purchase
3. Competitors are providing a better search experience than you

Using Elasticsearch, you’ll be able to optimize your search features and make sure your customers can always get exactly what they need – without any hassles.

4. You Want 24/7 Support 

Getting support for your Magento store can be difficult when you’re hosting it using Open Source.

If something goes wrong with your host, you have to contact your web hosting partner. If a feature or functionality breaks, you have to contact your of developers, or the developer of a Magento extension that you’ve purchased.

Working with multiple support teams is a tedious process, especially if you don’t always get 24/7 service.

But with Magento Commerce, you get 24/7 access to a team of experienced support professionals who can help you manage your website more effectively, and resolve your support queries quickly. 

No matter what kind of technical and operational issues you’re having, you’ll always have the helping hand of Magento Support on your side, which means less downtime and more sales. 

5. You’re Interested in Expanding Into B2B Sales 

Magento Commerce has a built-in B2B suite which can grow your business with a deep stack of features, including:

• Custom catalogs and pricing for each customer.
• Easy ordering by SKU or uploading of .CSV files.
• Support for multiple buyer tiers and corporate accounts.
• Real-time inventory tracking.
• Out-of-the-box mobile support.
• Integration with most existing backend systems using proprietary APIs.

If you’re looking to grow your B2B business, Magento Commerce is a no-brainer – it offers B2B tools and features that you simply can’t get with Magento Open Source.

6. You Want to Streamline the Creation of New Pages

The Magento Page Builder is currently exclusive to Magento Commerce. It’s a powerful WYSIWYG content creation system which allows you to quickly build new product pages, sale pages, banner images, videos and more, all without touching a single line of code.

Page Builder is useful for marketing and sales, and allows you to manage and create your own content quickly and easily, and design unique, flexible content layouts. If you’re not technically-minded, but would like to be able to build your own Magento web pages, you should definitely consider upgrading to Magento Commerce.

7. You Need More Sales Tools to Boost Conversion Rates

Magento Commerce has a number of great tools that you can use to help boost your conversion rates, and engage with website visitors more effectively, including:

• Instant purchase, which allows logged-in customers to purchase an item in just a few clicks.
• Multiple packaging choices.
• Out-of-the-box support for gift cards and over 100 unique promotions.
• Customer segmentation and personalization tools to target users with the right items at the right time.
• Powerful up-sell and cross-selling abilities.

Recognize One or More of the Above Signs? It May Be Time to Upgrade.

Upgrading to Magento Commerce from Magento Open Source is easier than you think.

The features and benefits you get from Commerce make it worth the investment, particularly if your company is starting to grow quickly.

For more information about migrating to Magento Commerce, or if you have any questions about its features, you can contact 121eCommerce. We’re Magento experts, and we’d be happy to help you migrate to Magento Commerce – or with any other part of your Magento store. And for more tips and tricks about Magento, please check out our blog.