Magento has announced a new Professional Edition that includes some of the company's Enterprise Edition features, at a much lower annual fee.
Magento started as a free, open-source platform. Last year, the company announced an Enterprise Edition aimed at larger ecommerce and multi-channel operators. This top-level offering costs $12,990 per year and includes a significant number of important features not available in the free Community Edition.
The new Magento Professional Edition will aim at small merchants that need more features than the Community Edition offers, but do not need everything available in the Enterprise Edition or its associated fee. Professional will be sold via a network of "Solution Partners" rather than directly from Magento itself and will cost just $2,995 per year.
Additional Features
In addition to all of the features available in the Community Edition, Magento Professional adds a reward points system; physical and virtual gift card sales and redemption; store credits that can be issued in the place of refunds or as part of the rewards program; and more advanced data encryption.
The Potential For Support
Because Magento Professional will be sold via partner companies, it is also likely that merchants will be able to purchase additional support from those partners for both setting up a Magento store and maintaining it.
One of the persistent complaints about the Community Edition is lack of support.
When the Community Edition was first launched, Magento team members patrolled the site's forums, offering a lot of advice, but as the company has grown and released more paid services the forums have not been as helpful. For example, many merchants (and developers) are still struggling with problems related to upgrading to version 1.4.0.1 of the Community Edition, which, when loaded via Magento's own upgrade service, Magento Connect, can bring down live sites.
The version 1.4 problem has persisted for at least three months, and has forced some stores to start fresh with earlier versions of the Community Edition.
An Opportunity for Developers
The Professional Edition also paves the way to new opportunities for developers. Joining the Magento Solutions Partners program now provides more benefits than just a listing on the Magento site. A developer or agency on that list can now be a reseller, potentially earning recurring income from both the sale of the Professional Edition and related support contracts.
