Magento Launches New Small Business Initiative

Many in the eCommerce space thought Magento had abandoned small businesses when they got rid of Magento Go and other small business options. However, the truth could not be further from that. Magento has spent considerable time and energy launching Small Business Magento, a great new initiative to help small businesses utilize the power and scalability of Magento at an affordable cost.

Magento SaaS

One of the interesting components to the small business initiative is the new Magento software as a service run by Pixafy. Pixafy claims to have solved two of the largest eCommerce problems for small businesses. “I want to be on Magento, but development costs exceed my available budget”. “I’m using BigCommerce, Shopify, or Volusion, but I need a platform that allows me to do more”. I tried their free trial and from my short experience with the platform I have to say I think they have delivered on this and what I saw far exceeded my expectations.

Magento do it for me

Magento small business also offers several do it yourself options and has partnered with several companies that provide relatively affordable Magento community design and development options. Creatuity offers a new product called Launch Pad for four thousand dollars that is supposedly a theme and suite of modules that gives you a strong starting base for Magento community. I have not personally tried Launch Pad or any of the small business do it for me options but they seem to be good options for businesses looking to utilize Magento on a low budget.

What to choose?

It seems to me that the Pixafy option is great if you want Magento’s core features without the hassle of upgrading Magento versions and utilizing a developer on an ongoing basis. However if you want the flexibility to customize your store heavily in the future you may want to think about the do it for me options because you will have the Magento Community open source platform that is not restricted like a SaaS platform.