Adobe Commerce (Magento Commerce) provides companies with a platform to manage, personalize, and optimize the commerce experience across every touch point and across the customer journey. ACC is built on Magento Commerce Pro and is integrated with Adobe Experience Manager. It was originally developed as an open-source eCommerce content management solution by Varien, Inc. Varien was acquired by eBay in…
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Podia
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Podia in New York offers their ecommerce platform for managing memberships and selling courses online.
Ultimately, if a company is looking for a solid industry-known E-Commerce system, Magento Commerce does exactly what it's intended to do. The headaches start when your company wants to start getting granular in customizations of the platform to meet specific business needs (which every company eventually has). This becomes a major issue down the road when trying to upgrade said customizations as the core software updates.
In my experience, Podia has been well suited in every way! I am a small company with a couple of independent contractors, and I don't know how to build my own website. I am not very techy. I get lots of compliments on how my website looks! I have had some people support me with setting up my group emails for my email list and setting up automations, and these techy people complained that they needed to do more customization in the email formatting and programming, so I switched to Mailchimp for those needs. Otherwise, I have been very happy with Podia and I am grateful to have a platform that offers so many services/features. It's affordable and user friendly. My clients and students are happy using it, too
Magento Commerce Cloud allows us to develop our own custom solutions for problems that we need solved.
Magento Commerce Cloud can also be integrated with many of the third part vendors that we use. This has made many implementations go very smoothly and tends to be much quicker than developing our own custom solution.
There are many features available right out of the box. Many of them we have not implemented yet, but it is great to have them available to us when we are ready.
The platform is difficult to tune and can be slow. Even with expensive best in class hardware the platform performance can be an issue. Even with caching poor coding can lead to unacceptable performance and user experiences.
The total cost of ownership for the platform can be quite high as a great deal of technical expertise is required to modify, develop, troubleshoot and maintain the platform. The costs of initial development are only a down payment on what a Magento store will cost. For mid size companies with substantial web revenues this can be overcome for smaller businesses the total cost of ownership may be prohibitive.
Security of the platform can be an issue. Magento is often targeted by hackers and much of the security is the responsibility of the store owner.
Magento is well-supported by a big development team at eBay, which not only addresses bug reports very quickly, but also is constantly working on improvements to the platform. The wealth of Magento third party modules ensures that the platform will be up to date with future changes to Payment or ERP systems. Security is always a concern and with the Zend framework as a foundation, Magento has had very few security-related patches since I have started to work with it
Magento offers lots of templates and themes to customize the look and feel of the store, and even optimize it for mobile phones. The have an extensive library of forms and templates.
Magento scales much better than any of the other software when it comes to very large e-commerce websites. But all the other options are more user-friendly for smaller sites as there is a bit of a learning curve in learning to manage Magento. Customization is better along with WooCommerce and OpenCart as self-hosted solutions vs. BigCommerce and Shopify which are hosted. Magento should be the first choice for large, extensive e-commerce solutions,but for smaller stores, I would recommend the others first.
Kajabi had lots of features all in one place. I liked their digital course creator program. I liked the ease of their their membership site program/host, too. It had an app for my clients to use. There were some problems with not being able to customize the look of pages, but they allowed coding/programming if you had training, so I sometimes hired someone to do that for me. I couldn't figure out how to use their website builder, so I didn't do much there. When it came down to it, I could use Podia and it was cheaper and easier to use. GoDaddy was my website host for a few years. I did a lot on there. It was my website builder and host and I liked it. It was easy to use. My website looked great. It had more features than Podia with blogging and connecting to social media. I had a storefront but it wasn't great for selling digital products. Back then, it wanted to show my inventory and shipping options, which don't apply for services and digital products. I did a little with my digital courses on there, but in the end, I liked other sites better for this. It didn't work out. Weebly was just a starting point for me when I create my first digital course. I liked how it looked and it was easy to build, but there are better options for this sort of thing now.
Magento definitely lets us get a return on our investment. Because we have developers who can customize Magento to our needs, we have been able to create a beautiful and effective website, run promotions, and serve up customized product display pages that are effective and beautifully branded.
Magento has also caused a lot of time to be invested in doing something that seems simple, but without a lot of knowledge, end up taking far more time than could otherwise be better-spent.
We have had to outsource some of our development work due to Magento being developer-focused rather than marketer/merchandiser-focused. I've used other website management software that is comparable to Magento's capabilities but is far easier to use, that even someone like me (with basic HTML/CSS skills) can customize the front-end without requiring a back-end developer to intervene.
