Ecommerce Platform Battles: Magento Commerce vs Remarkable Commerce
Introduction
The tech stack chosen by a retailer will determine their digital performance, thus making the wrong option might be fatal. However, re-platforming is a massive undertaking for any store and should not be underestimated; however, it is frequently a necessity for growth, as many merchants will see minimal (or even negative) year-over-year growth and will have reached the limits of their current platforms’ capabilities.
Magento (Now catchily named ‘Adobe Commerce’) is one of the biggest names in the B2C eCommerce platform space. They enable medium to large retailers to effectively sell products online. The platform power online storefronts for a number of large global brands, including Barbour, Brewdog, Missguided, Harvey Nichols, Converse, Adidas and Charles Tyrwhitt. Remarkable Commerce is used by many leading UK retailers, including Ben Sherman, Moss, Roman, Yours Clothing, Absolute Snow, SGS Engineering and WoolOvers.
Both solutions are significantly different, and if you’re thinking about using Magento Commerce or Remarkable Commerce, you’ll need to understand the differences in order to make the best choice. To assist you in doing so, I’ve compiled a list of points of comparison between the platforms, covering all important deciding factors for a re-platforming project.
Any retailer that is growing swiftly needs a solid eCommerce platform that can adapt to its changing needs. They are right to be reading about comparisons between the top players in order to figure out which solution will be the best fit for their specific scenario, given the abundance of possibilities available.
So, what are the core differences and comparisons between these platforms? Below we review the most common features and popular questions.
Cost of Ownership
Remarkable Commerce: Because the Remarkable Commerce Platform is completely tailored for each retailer, it is not an “off-the-shelf” SaaS offering like its competitors. There are no GMV or commission costs, and the licencing charge is simply based on average monthly sessions with tiered price ranges. The cost of building is typically between £70k-£100k. The monthly licence fee covers unlimited use of the Remarkable Commerce platform for an unlimited number of admin users, an unlimited number of API calls, several product variations, phone and email technical support during office hours, server, database, error log, third-party, and browser maintenance, and server, database, error log, third-party, and browser maintenance.
When reviewing TCO (total cost of ownership), a typical model will span 3-5 years, which is the length of time expected until the software becomes end-of-life and ready for an upgrade. With Remarkable Commerce, the TCO starts low and remains low. Typically, the build development is low enough to be OpEx (operating expenses), instead of CapEx (capital expenditure).
Magento Commerce: An average Magento Commerce build typically is between £100k and £1m, depending on the requirements and size of the site. Licensing fees for Magento Commerce start around £2k per month, obviously on top of the website build/development costs. Although the licensing costs start relatively sensible, this can get really expensive depending on the size of your business. Amongst other factors, Magento now works to GMV (gross-merchandising-volume) brackets – taking a commission of any sale your website processes.
According to expert eCommerce consultant https://vervaunt.com/magento-commerce-vs-salesforce-commerce-cloud-demandware-platform-comparison…
“ With larger B2B retailers, Magento’s pricing will tend to be more bespoke, which seems to vary based on lots of things, particularly for > $100m turnover businesses. Magento Commerce Order Management is billed separately and can also be very expensive, depending on order volumes and complexity. “
Magento Commerce pricing is also dependent on the type of product chosen. Most commonly, Magento is an on-premise, self-housed eCommerce platform, but they do have 2 ‘PaaS’ (Platform-as-a-Service) solutions too – Magento Commerce Starter Edition, and Magento Commerce Professional Edition.
Market Sector
Remarkable Commerce: UK Medium-sized B2C retailers – with turnover between £5m and £50m p/a. Particular sectors include fashion and apparel (80%), sporting equipment, luxury jewellery and toys. The technology agility attracts the attention of retailers from many sectors, as the platform allows for infinite options and limitless configurations.
Magento Commerce: Between 2010 and 2018, Magento’s credibility grew and the number of UK retailers using a Magento platform grew to well over 10,000. However, over the last 4 years, Magento uptake has slowed down substantially. Magento is used by retailers in almost every retail sector, with the most popular being apparel/shoes (60%), furniture (20%), groceries and consumables (20%).
Since they were acquired in 2018 by Adobe, many expected a re-birth of Magento, and the many bugs (and several year delays) that came with Magento 2, would be resolved swiftly and a brand relaunch was expected. However, this has not happened, and instead, Magento has continued to age even further. Adobe officially consolidated the branding of Magento Commerce and Adobe Commerce Cloud into the single brand of Adobe Commerce in 2019 – yet it is still commonly known as Magento.
Integration Partners
Remarkable Commerce: The Remarkable Commerce platform has over 300 integrated solutions, covering a wide range of technology types. Although the integrations are not self-serving in the admin, all historic integrations are fairly plug-and-play and available with a short amount of development time. https://remarkable.net/integrations/ the full list of integrations, updated annually.
The biggest advantage of a fully custom hybrid-SaaS solution like Remarkable is that an integration can be tailored to work exactly how a retailer or 3rd-party wishes it to – commonly, going beyond best practice and into ‘perfect practice’.
Magento Commerce: Most of the time, you will want to integrate your eCommerce platform with your backend systems (like ERP/ Accounting, POS or 3PL). However, if your integration providers don’t know the endpoint systems well enough, they might make the Magento integration go horribly wrong. For example, an ERP uses product data in a different way compared to Magento. Then, your integration provider should know how to cope with that difference.
One of the most common integration issues which Magento retailers face is getting data in or out of Magento via their APIs. Additionally, it will hardly can deliver the performance you expect, and will lead to issues like database locking and update failures. All of which are massive headaches.
APIs & Architecture
Remarkable Commerce: True innovation and development agility is possible when your eCommerce platform can be integrated with any solution and data can be accessed in real-time both manually and dynamically – this is why an open API is critical and why Remarkable Commerce has a suite of APIs which can be used in a headless fashion to retrieve and post data to. Headless architecture and simple, API integrations give you the flexibility to engage customers across every retail touchpoint – web, mobile, apps, marketplaces, and in-store – and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences. Remarkable Commerce has a pre-integrated front-end accelerator that slashes ‘time to web’ for new digital storefronts, so you can focus on UX, brand strategy and optimisation.
Magento Commerce: Magento ‘Commerce Cloud’ is an upgrade of a Magento Commerce self-hosted edition, that stands side-by-side with Magento Open Source. It is known that all versions of Magento offer a large amount of flexibility, and developers have access to almost (if not all) source code within the platform. However, the big drawback is stability and security – which are Magento’s main flaws and pain points.
Magento releases security patches several times per year, which even if you have a Cloud solution, still require manual work to update. There are regular security concerns and vulnerabilities with Magento, where malware can intercept your customer's shopping behaviour and hackers gain access to your website code and databases.
Product & Catalogue Management
Remarkable Commerce: With an endlessly customisable admin (and storefront!), all Remarkable Commerce platform clients have heavily tailored functionality which saves them time and effort, when managing large amounts of products and categories. A few popular features inside the PIM module of Remarkable Commerce include a product translations interface, allowing the retailer to bulk set translated copy.
Magento Commerce: Magento was built to sell products, not to manage them. This becomes apparent when you face challenges like viewing change logs for product data or having unique category structures for each parent product category. The Magento architecture also prevents you from several important requirements that retailers often have, including effectively managing your product attributes in bulk, as each product/item is not connected smartly. Plus, retailers are unable to build product segments and dynamic collections of products based on attributes.
Another issue is product image duplication, as Magento clone the product images for each product, even if it is the same image file. This leads to inefficiencies with data caching.
Order Management
Remarkable Commerce: The OMS module in the Remarkable Commerce platform has many customisable fields and functions, with the base solution including Bulk Orders Management, Returns and Refunds Management, Custom Order tagging, Management of Order status emails, Bespoke Invoicing, Automated Courier Tracking, Automated Payment Tracking, Manual Order (MOTO) functions for Customer Service teams and a full suite of advanced reporting.
Magento Commerce: One of the most common order management issues which Magento retailers face is that Magento uses a global stock position for the whole platform, no matter how many storefronts are created. This means that if a product runs out of stock, it will become unavailable in every website. For companies who have multiple warehouses and who want to leverage those in different countries, this feature is crucial to be able to sell the same product in one country (region) and show it out of stock in another country.
Another common challenge is the amendment of order details after an order has been placed. The platform will cancel the original order and create a new one, with the new details. This has many knock-on effects on both the customer and the process flows.
Extensibility & Flexibility
Remarkable Commerce: One of the biggest USPs of Remarkable Commerce is how extendable the platform is. This is achievable because each retailer who uses the Remarkable Commerce Platform has a tailored version of the storefront, that is connected through APIs, to their fully-custom admin/control panel. Both the front end and the admin are commonly extended to include additional modules, functions and connectors. With full access to every line of architecture code, the Remarkable Commerce agency team have no limitations or restrictions, leading to infinitely customisable customer experiences.
Magento Commerce: There is a decent feature set in the base Magento Commerce platform, but it does have some limitations. In every single Magento build, there will be particular features that aren’t available as a core asset. These features are only available in 3rd-party solutions, which need to be installed and integrated into the platform code. Magento is commonly extended and is not known for being overly restrictive, however, retailers should be cautious in extending and customising too far – as this will impact performance and speed hugely.
Admin Ease of Use
Remarkable Commerce: The Remarkable Commerce Manager (admin portal) has been moulded over the last 20+ years, with the direction and direct input from clients of various sizes – this has led to a comprehensive and easy-to-use platform, where a retailer can complete key actions much quicker than other platforms. An example of this is promotion/campaign setup and launching, which can be achieved within minutes. Each client has a tailored version of the core admin where they request function and UX updates – ultimately leading the development roadmap for their own version.
Magento Commerce: One of Magento’s most common downfalls and known issues is ‘speed’ – and this extends to the admin portal too. Most of the time, when your Magento Admin Panel is slow, it also means your front-end storefronts are slow. So although the Magento admin is relatively straightforward to learn and use, retailers struggle with code bloat and load times.
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
Remarkable Commerce: Remarkable Commerce is a totally bespoke platform so the admin can be tailored to suit your needs within the build phase. Due to it being flexible, it allows for custom rules and logic to be created to automate certain features that influence SEO, such as a product retirement strategy. It doesn’t, however, have plugins and any mar-tech integration would be actioned as a development project.
Magento Commerce: Faceted navigations are a great way for users to get through a large e-commerce site. Customers can use filters to find exactly what they’re looking for. Faceted navigations, on the other hand, might be a source of optimization headaches. Magento’s faceted navigation generates parameter URLs that are frequently crawled, causing Magento SEO difficulties. Because Google only crawls a fraction of your Magento site at a time, indexation bloat is a concern, and you want it to focus on the essential pages that provide value to visitors (and have value to the business). You aren’t optimised for crawling if there are hundreds or thousands of URL parameters to worry about.
Roadmap
Remarkable Commerce: Each retailer who uses the Remarkable Commerce Platform has its own unique roadmap of storefront and admin new functionality, change requests and version updates. This enables every retailer to take their own direction but also benefit from the larger frequent platform updates that every client receives.
Magento Commerce: In 2022, Magento’s global roadmap focuses on these four key areas: headless commerce, new B2B capabilities, intelligent commerce, and improvements to the cloud infrastructure. We view these progressive developments as Magento ‘catching up’ with the industry and updating its foundations to allow for future innovation – yet, Magento is not known for its ‘innovation’.
Internationalisation
Remarkable Commerce: Retailers need the ability to change, adapt and launch as quickly as possible, without needing to repeat tasks. This is the reason that we created functionality for retailers to launch promotions across multiple sites, apply configuration updates to multiple sites and publish content updates to selected sites in real time. Removing restrictions, improving efficiencies and enabling revenue growth. Remarkable Commerce retailers can choose the configuration of their international model – with limitless options for sharing (or separating) product data, stock data, category architecture, third parties and checkout options – all in a truly headless fashion.
Magento Commerce: Magento’s multi-store feature allows retailers to manage many brands, regional stores, and B2B/B2C businesses from a single Magento admin interface. The key advantage is that the product catalogue may be shared across several websites, stores, and store views, with the flexibility to make modifications at various levels. Attribute scope can be adjusted to be maintained at a global or local level, allowing merchants to assign global attributes like “product name” while defining the price or long description attribute at a local level. This is true at all levels and is a significant advantage for Magento for multinational, multi-brand, and B2B2C retailers.
Storefront Speed & Performance
Remarkable Commerce: With an obsession with site speed and storefront performance, the frontend developers at Remarkable Commerce pay particular attention to speed metrics and regularly undertake speed audits, to review what area of code can be optimised further. This continuous exercise ensures that our clients are providing the very best customer experience and the quickest sites possible.
Magento Commerce: Speed is critical in eCommerce; this isn’t new information. As a general guideline, you should not leave a user waiting for more than 3 seconds; else, they will likely go on to a rival who is more responsive. While cached sites are delivered in a matter of seconds, not all pages can be cached. Category pages with dynamic filtering methods are a nice example. Magento retailers are required to alter a category or product data, in order to force a cache refresh. The discrepancy in loading times between cached and uncached pages perplexes users and grows exponentially as the number of page view requests increases.
M2 (Magento 2) has a bad reputation because of slow platform speed and although there are workarounds which developers can implement, this is arguably a waste of development resources and budget.
Conclusion
The question of what eCommerce platform to use (or migrate to) is always a really tough decision for any business to make, especially when the retailer has a turnover above £50m p/a – as there is a lot more budget at stake, more stakeholders involved etc. Enterprise eCommerce solutions don’t come cheap and they require a huge amount of time (and a lot of people) to implement, run and maintain. This is why it’s incredibly important that you remain highly organised and systematic in your research and decision-making process, as selecting the wrong platform can have a huge impact on your business.
Ultimately, a retailer's platform choice should be in line with both its current online performance and its growth ambitions. There are many pros and cons for both Shopify Plus and BigCommerce, and where one excels, the other underperforms.
For retailers with a turnover above £5m p/a and considering a platform move, learn more our comprehensive eCommerce platform here.
If you’re interested in reading further platform comparisons, here is an article comparing Shopify Plus and Remarkable Commerce. As two of the most popular, fastest-growing commerce platforms in the market today, Shopify are often two of the most popular choices when reviewing eCommerce platform providers – and more commonly now, in the enterprise space too.
