How Choosing Magento Commerce Cloud Can Lower Your TCO

As a Magento-only shop since we opened our doors in 2014, we here at 121eCommerce have seen dozens of projects come to us midstream. Some may be over budget or their Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) might be nowhere near what they were expecting. Believe it or not, many issues that result in overspending, delays, and overall frustration with eCommerce implementations can be traced back to a lack of proper planning and due diligence before the project even begins.

Instead of taking the time to scope out every task and set clear expectations to manage and minimize TCO, too many projects kick off with a launch date and an incomplete plan for getting there. This lack of discipline leads to unforeseen roadblocks and additional costs later on. While best practices are important, it’s just as important to learn where things can go wrong and how merchants can mitigate these risks.

From the outset, one important decision a merchant can make that can have a dramatic positive impact on TCO is choosing Magento Commerce on cloud.

Magento Commerce on cloud is a packaged solution that comes with many integrated services that help manage total cost of ownership, including hosting, support, security, and maintenance. These services can help you get up and running fast and also cut down on development time, saving you money upfront and in ongoing maintenance costs. Additionally, capabilities like enhanced security features, built-in monitoring software, and enhanced, dedicated support, prime merchants for future growth.

Choosing Magento Commerce on cloud takes much of the guesswork out of calculating total cost of ownership:

• Magento Commerce on cloud is a platform-as-a-service offering that enables rapid deployment of fully customizable, secure, and scalable web storefronts, combined with a leading hosting and managed services infrastructure.
• With a content delivery network and performance management tools pre-integrated in the offering, contract management is easy.
• Availability on both AWS and Azure provides merchants with choice and a fully redundant cloud hosting infrastructure that delivers optimized performance, resilience, and elastic scalability.

The infrastructure and server configuration was designed and built by Adobe based on years of real-life experience and hundreds of Magento Commerce stores.

How Magento Commerce Reduces Cost

• Eliminates vendor management and labor costs because it comes with multiple Magento-hosted cloud services already built-in (i.e., Amazon, Fastly and New Relic).
• Maintenance and update costs are included so you never have to worry about paying a developer to upgrade you to the latest Magento version.
• Provides patches for, and proactively monitors, core application and cloud infrastructure putting you in a proactive, rather than reactive stance. This reduces emergencies and security breaches which can be costly to fix due to their urgency and premium fees charged by third-party developers or development companies.
• Adobe owns both the software and hardware which makes it easier and faster to debug and resolve issues.
• Magento Commerce on cloud delivers a comprehensive, cost-effective support plan for all your eCommerce needs; 24x7 support is included for all services -- the core eCommerce application, cloud-based infrastructure, and the pre-integrated technologies.

Empowering Merchants

Magento Commerce offers a wealth of training materials and a comprehensive resource center to empower merchants to self-manage their site and eliminate the requirement and expense to engage external IT and development resources:

• Instructor-led (in-person and virtual) classes
• On-demand learning content
• Downloads
• Videos

For a full list of Magento Commerce learning resources, visit the Adobe Digital Learning Services page.

On 121eCommerce site, we also curated a list of 32 Magento demo videos (many under 2 minutes) that contain quick overviews of Magento Commerce features and replays of in-depth how-to videos.

Merchants can also connect with the Adobe Support Community to help troubleshoot and answer questions.

Case Study: Norscot

Norscot is a 50-year old company and one of the top forty promotional products companies in the United States.

Before moving to Magento Commerce, Norscot used an eCommerce platform that required extensive technical knowledge to make even the smallest change to their website. They had aggressive plans to expand their business and needed the ability to manage multiple sites under one admin.

When comparing the TCO of all their requirements if they stayed on their current platform versus moving to Magento, it became very clear which way to go.

Many of the capabilities the client wanted were native to Magento Commerce while creating the same functionality on their current site would require extensive customization.

Although switching platforms was not an easy path, Norscot decided that Magento Commerce hosted on cloud was the best way to achieve their long-term growth goals at the lowest TCO.

Switching to Magento Commerce hosted in the cloud can help growing small and mid-sized businesses see a faster ROI than simply staying on their current platform. In fact, in a recent survey, merchants that upgraded to Magento Commerce saw an average 3-year ROI of 165.3%. That’s a significant ROI. That’s the reward merchants see with such a robust, feature-rich platform.

_As an Adobe Gold Partner, 121eCommerce was named Adobe’s Emerging Partner of the Year for 2020. They have established a reputation as a go-to agency for Magento 2 launches, project rescues, complex site builds, and tight deadlines. With an average variance of SOW to launch of under 5%, they’ve established themselves as one of Adobe’s premier Magento web development agencies delivering easy-to-use, conversion-focused eCommerce storefronts.