EBay has announced its decision to shut down its ecommerce software products from Magento Go and ProStores. The announcement came because of the changes in the market requirements and according to EBay the decision was unavoidable. Keeping in consideration the holiday shopping season, the ecommerce giant has offered to keep the store open till February 1, 2015 after which the Magento Go and ProStores will be closed. The decision has been made to pay more attention to the Magento Enterprise and Community Editions offerings that are more profitable and attract bigger and sophisticated online sellers than Magento Go and ProStores. Earlier this year, in the month of March, EBay had downsized about 50 employees from Magento. The reason that was given then was that the company was focusing more on the core Magento products like Magento Enterprise Edition and Community Edition.
This move by EBay is expected to force more than 10,000 small and midsized merchants to a different e-commerce platform. Magento has been instrumental in the success of those merchants. Small businesses will have till February 1st to shift their online shops to other services. EBay has also posted several online resources to help its customers decide what they can do next. It is hoped by Magento that the customers will opt to upgrade to the Enterprise or Community editions that are being presently supported. However is the customers do not want to upgrade for profitability purposes they always have the option of migrating to Bigcommerce. Bigcommerce was the former competitor and it is expected that the customers will be assimilated into it without any transition issues.
Bigcommerce has a history of handling store migrations successfully and its existing interactions with EBay and PayPal have been handled well by the company. According to Steven Power, the President of BigCommerce, the company has handled the migration of 12,000 companies from other ecommerce platforms which included 6000 former ProStores customers. Magento customers who switch over are offered special discounts by Bigcommerce. This is expected to be a huge deal for Bigcommerce if it managed to snag a majority of the 10,000 customers of Magento as it already has 50,000 clients.
Author Bio: Mitchell Martinez is a freelance writer and is currently working for EssaysOrigin.com, an online portal to look for essay services reviews.
