The decision to upgrade your eCommerce site from Magento Community to Enterprise Edition is not one to be made lightly. Why should your company switch from the free, well-outfitted Community? Enterprise offers everything Community does and more, and the following eight reasons are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making the decision to upgrade.
Security is a key concern for consumers and reports of sites being hacked are hitting the news more and more often, so having the tools available to protect your customers is critical in today’s marketplace. Enterprise Edition features the Magento Secure Payment Bridge, a PA-DSS-compliant means for communicating payment information that provides customers greater peace of mind and is one step towards achieving overall PCI Compliance. For more information on PCI Compliance standards, visit the Magento Resources page.
Nothing frustrates a potential customer more than having to wait and wait and wait for their page to load so they can check out those sought-after shoes. Not offered in Community, Full-Page Caching dramatically decreases load times for your site. It can cache an entire page with static content, as opposed to caching each aspect of the page individually. This increases performance and decreases hardware load but, perhaps most importantly, leads to less frustrated shoppers.
Change can be scary in any situation, so it is comforting to know that someone has your back and can answer your concerns and questions directly so that your site can run smoothly. The Enterprise license includes technical support from the Magento team, which is available to provide answers to all your questions around “How To” and basic configuration, installation and downloads, and troubleshooting and bug fixes. While the support plan is a great first step in keeping your site on track, it does not include services like code development or customization. For something like that, it is best to rely on a certified development team.
Mistakes happen and there are times when a customer needs to make a return or exchange. Given that they are already disappointed because their purchase did not meet their expectations, the last thing a retailer wants to do is create further dissatisfaction by providing a convoluted return/exchange process. Problem solved – the Enterprise Edition has Return Merchandise Authorization as an out of the box function, a very helpful feature for stores selling physical merchandise. Returned items can also be exchanged for store credit through Enterprise. As an added feature, along with store credit capabilities comes the option for gift cards, which can be distributed online or physically.
Although Community offers Rule-Based Product Relations, it does not support the number of items that Enterprise does. Enterprise is able to apply categories and create relations in catalogs containing 10,000 or more products. This allows you to automatically up sell and cross sell related products, providing potential options to shoppers - which is a huge plus. The impact can be seen in an increase in revenue, order value and customer satisfaction.
Increased traffic to your site and higher customer conversion rates are two of the primary goals of any eCommerce Marketing Strategy. The Advanced Segmentation offered in Enterprise lets you perform more specific marketing to your customers and is one of the more popular reasons people upgrade to Enterprise. With this feature you can segment customers based on certain information such as location or order history, and provide incentives based on those segments that can increase revenue.
With the continued growth of online sales and fierce competition to attract shoppers, online retailers need to find ways to set themselves apart from the crowd. Growing customer loyalty and increasing order values can be accomplished through reward programs. Offering Reward or Loyalty Points can help a one-time customer become a frequent customer. Enterprise offers a well-integrated Reward Point system focused on giving online retailers a tool to help them increase customer loyalty.
From a business perspective, nothing is more frustrating than attracting a customer, having them select their items and place them in their cart and then – nothing; they leave the site before closing the sale. With all the distractions that can happen in your daily life, the question that persists for online retailers is, “Did my customer leave because they changed their mind, or did something come up – like the boss walked by and they had to close the site?" No one likes being dogged by emails, but email campaigns, such as for abandoned carts, are a great way to convert an order. Automated Emails through Enterprise make it easy to contact these customers and encourage them to make that purchase. Additionally, by utilizing segmentation in combination with the automated emails feature, it is easy to send targeted emails to certain customers based on preferences that can drive more traffic and, ultimately, more conversions.
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