What you Should Know about Magento Commerce Starter Edition

02/10/2017 By Kate Fairman Reading Time: 2 minutes

Magento has become something of a platform pacemaker. And the latest in a series of game-changing launches came a couple of weeks ago, in the form of Magento Commerce Starter Edition. The younger sibling to Magento Commerce Professional Edition, the Starter Edition rounds out the platform’s Cloud offering. It’s a solution intended for smaller businesses: brand starting out with smaller budgets, looking to combine a Cloud hosted infrastructure with a Commerce license at a lower cost. To be a little more specific, that lower cost starts at $1,999 a month instead of the $3,999 for the Professional Edition.

So, what qualifies your brand as small enough to be eligible? The Starter Edition is available to retailers who are generating less than 10 million USD in revenue every year, and you’ll need to have to have less than 50,000 complex SKUs. The accessibility to smaller scale, start-up brands was always a huge part of Shopify’s niche. At this end of the market, there are relatively few options when it comes to platforms offering the scalability, security and functionality that small businesses need. The latest launch shows Magento opening themselves up to this area of the market. Back in August, their new wholesale retailer-friendly module for the Commerce Professional Edition saw Magento named a leader in B2B Commerce suites by independent research authority Forrester. It looks a lot like the platform to picking up the pace when it comes to covering all bases to beat the competitors. We’ve put together a quick comparison guide for small brands choosing between Magento and Shopify.

	Magento Commerce Starter Edition	Shopify Plus
Cost	Starting at $1,999 per month	Starting $2,000 per month
Cloud Hosting & Deployment	Cloud integration tools with unlimited users. Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) based production, staging and optimised development environments. Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN) with generous bandwidth allowances.	Seamless integration with any IT platform. Software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Fully-integrated Fastly Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Performance	Runs on shared infrastructure. Performance monitoring	Fully hosted. 99% uptime.
B2B Capabilities	Magento B2B functionality available at additional cost.	Seperate Wholesale Channel available at no additional cost.
Insight & Analysis Tools	Does not include Magento Business Intelligence module (although this can be added for additional cost).	Does not include in-the-box Intelligence tools (range of insight and analytics apps and plug-ins available for additional cost).