Magento 1 draws to a slow close

 

Replatforming our clients from one e-Commerce system to another is a large part of the work we do. It’s sensitive technical and creative work – and more than that, it’s business critical. We’re at the centre of moving clients from one place to the other with the absolute minimum of disruption to their sales environment. Magento is a really popular e-Commerce platform, built on years of community support and technical experience. As part of its future roadmap, Magento will be focusing their efforts on Magento 2 – a new platform, separate from 1 – which means that eventually, 1 is going to come to its end of life.

Support but no future development

So, what does this actually mean? Essentially, Magento have canned any idea of ending support without a long notice period (18 months, at a minimum) and this is good news – it means that the business owners who might otherwise have been left out in the wilderness will still have support – but the active development path almost certainly ends here. Magento 1 and all of its versions will have no pro-active development programmes – meaning no new features or associated products, leaving 1 users trailing behind in a very competitive time in e-Commerce’s innovation curve.

Future options

So really, this leaves Magento-based businesses with a few options. These are:

Stick with 1.x

Sticking with Magento 1 means a few things. It means continuing as-is, with the understanding that there’s limited mileage left in the existing platform. You’ll still be supported, until the next announcement – in which you’ll have somewhere in the region of 18 months to come up with a contingency plan. But, there’ll be no active development branch and it’s unlikely that there’ll be any new features released. Primary resources will go into Magento 2, and at some point, you’ll need to explore either the second or third option to keep your business from stagnating. This new <img> tag pulls in the second product image. Alternatively, you could use — to pull in the last product image.

Upgrade to 2

Upgrading to 2 is certainly an option – and in their own words, the upgrade to 2 represents a “an outstanding upgrade to a world-class commerce system, and includes capabilities that improve site performance, provide better visibility into business results, and drive differentiated omnichannel commerce experiences”. What this requires, however, is:

Diligence done on the new platform to understand it’s new features – this is critical to ensuring that your business can continue on unaffected (at the very minimum) and hopefully with major improvements that help you serve your customers and internal requirements better.

Understanding any new associated cost or licensing models – making sure that ongoing overheads aren’t prohibitive, complex or untenable.
A migration project – moving your 1.x property over to 2 – a hefty project for stores of most sizes, which can often involve both design and development work.

Reimagine and re-platform

Alternatively, there’s the option of pivoting to something completely new. There are a number of e-Commerce platforms available for stores of all sizes – and sometimes, migrating to a brand new platform is the best strategy for growing businesses that require better systems that are ready to scale with ambitious growth. We’re experienced in all kinds of e-Commerce systems – but increasingly, we work with Shopify – a platform that has pricing and feature tiers to match one-man bands or enterprise-grade sales operations.