Magento develops from Challenger to Leader: Gartner Magic Quadrant for e-commerce 2017
Gartner has published their annual research & analysis on e-commerce vendors. The number of vendors is rapidly growing. The report evaluated 21 vendors of e-commerce platforms to assist companies in supporting their omnichannel journey and their digital presence.
Among these vendors, Magento has been profiled as a Leader now. Previous year Magento was recognized as a Challenger. Magento has now become a Leader, based on its growing and flexible e-commerce platform that is used in many verticals and by companies of various sizes across many countries.
Definition Gartner
Gartner defines digital commerce (aka e-commerce) as:
Buying and selling interactions among business, people and things for products/servcies via digitalize technologies. These interactions result in a valued transaction to the customer, based on a combination of factors, including good customer experience, inexpensive price, timeliness, ease of use, clear policies and others.
Strengths of Magento
Each vendor has been analyzed on their Strengths and Cautions. For Magento, these are the strengths:
Flexibility
Because of the open-core solution and APIs (REST and SOAP), Magento can be heavily customized. Tinx-IT is utilizing the SOAP API of Magento to connect several ERP systems (Dynamics NAV, Dynamics 365) with the platform. This ecosystem makes Magento suitable for many companies and a wide range of transactions, outside traditional retail or digital sales of physical products.
Cost-Effectiveness
Magento offers a flexible pricing model based on tiers of digital commerce GMV revenue generated throughout each customer B2C, B2B or B2BB2C website(s). This model, coupled with license costs (only Enterprise edition) lower than many competitors, is making Magento a very cost-effective option.
A majority of its reference customers reported high satisfaction with the overall value of the solution; all companies reported extremely high overall satisfaction with both Magento and its digital commerce platform.
Speed and architectural improvements
Since version 2.x has been released (November 2015), Magento has made performance and architectural improvements in subsequent versions. These include separating databases for customer and product data and checkout improvements.
Cautions of Magento
Besides the strengths also, a number of cautions are identified by Gartner:
Product Upgrade
Upgrades from Magento 1.x to Magento 2.x was delayed because of the lack of extensions and proper upgrade tools. Improvements were made in 2016, but still, a lot of customers has expressed their concerns.
For the Dynamics NAV – Magento upgrades, we are moving forward. But the problem with an upgrade is that the customer has to start with a completely new implementation: Magento 2.x differs completely in architecture from Magento 1.x. It is not possible to use the same configuration for web services. At the moment we are doing several upgrades for our existing customers. We will use this experience to improve and speed up the upgrade path for the integration.
Default B2B functionality
B2B implementations of Magento have heavily relied on third-party extensions to private functionality for complex pricing algorithm as Customer specific pricing & discounts, sales representatives, quick-order lists, and matrix pages for products with multiple dimensions such as size and colour.
Since April 2017, Magento has released native B2B functionality for its Enterprise version. This version is an out-of-the-box B2B platform where fewer extensions are needed. For the current Community version, specific B2B extensions are needed as Magento B2B Pricing & Discounts module and the Magento Customer Portal module.
Sales and Support Strategy
Most of the offices of Magento are based in North America and less in Europe. With a large potential customer base in Asia/Pacific and more multinational companies expanding in that region, this might be a lack of resources as Magento continues to established new solutions and technology partners in this market to support its customers.
Conclusion
We are happy that Magento is recognized by Gartner as a leader, we think it is one of the best e-commerce platforms nowadays. We see the cautions as points where Magento can have quick wins or is already working on to bow the caution into a strength.
That is also the reason our customer base is growing each year. Companies in several industries and verticals are choosing Magento.
Some of the new companies (retail and wholesale) this year who has chosen for our solution the Tinx connector to integrate Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Magento are AirTech International, Grupo Odem (LS Retail), Alex Reid, Digital Data Communications, Sail, Uniform Brands (Pebblestone) Silicycle and many more.
Contact us
Also interested in how Tinx-IT can help with your e-commerce strategy if you are a Microsoft Dynamics NAV user? Contact us for more information: sales@tinx-it.nl or via the contact page.
