Magento is dead – Merchants want a suite of marketing tools, not refactored code

Anyone have a cache?

EDIT: here it is. No infringement intended.

Magento has been in decline since Varien sold to eBay. Magento Community Edition is dead. Magento Go is a failure surpassed by Shopify. Magento CE releases have dried up.

So now what?

Magento 2.0 sounds promising. However, Magento 2.0 is lead by developers-only. No marketeers are involved to communicate merchant needs. I have tested Magento 2.0 dev60 and it is nothing more than a technical rewrite. Magento 2 offers the same feature set as Magento 1. You'll just need to pay a developer to migrate all your 1.x extensions to 2.x, since there is no upgrade path.

But the community cost of everyone moving to Magento 2.0 ranges in the $USD 1 billion. This is how developers keep themselves employed: by regularly clusterfucking your code. A developer focus on Magento 2.0 gives us jQuery, OWASP security policies, faster product imports, better performance and less CSS. But it does nothing to advance merchant's needs. Magento is missing a most important suite of marketing and sales automation tools.

Here is some features online merchants really dream about:

built-in A/B testing; integrated social media ROI tracking (e.g. SumAll statistics); sales automation tools: abandoned cart reports, automated follow-up emails, automated payment reminders; consumer behavior profiling to live-target marketing efforts based on behavior; customer persona segmentation such as "single men / mothers with children / affluent customers", to increase marketing effectiveness; easy-to-use multi-site and multilingual installations (Magento is cumbersome); helpdesk ticketing system, built-in live chat; built-in onestepcheckout; automated SEO using artificial intelligence; scheduled product imports to update product prices, stock, images attributes - including the ability to create new products and disable out-of-stock products; automatic product categorization based on product description content; social ecommerce ("share this product" with product landing pages for Facebook/Twitter); clever discounts such as bundled product discounts: "buy A+B together, get 5% discount on B"; built-in product XML/CSV exports for ciao, kelkoo, thefind, google and so forth; built-in newsletter or at the very least built-in Mailchimp support (with automatic setup); None of the above features are going to be implemented in Magento 2.0. What is the incentive to move to Magento 2.0? There is none. Do merchants really need the latest gimmicky "html5" technology? Mercahnts need a suite of sales and marketing tools that help drive their business.

So again, like before Magento, there is a huge market potential for ecommerce software that offers the right marketing tools. Magento is dead. But who will bridge the gap? Shopfiy? Wordpress Woocommerce? Drupal Commerce? Each of these new projects is gaining on Magento's lead. My prediction is that Magento 1.x adoption has peaked and Magento 2.x adoption will never happen. Instead, The People will switch to far more advanced alternatives. Advanced in terms of marketing that is, not jQuery.

It was probably running on Magento.

If it's not God's official temple, we all agree it's nothing.

If it is God's official temple, it lasts longer than Linux or Windows.

God says... vengeful Moses SupremerCourt IMHO One_finger_salute liberal honesty by_the_way act I_can't_believe_it repeat_after_me meek heaven Terry pardon_the_french youre_lucky delightful rose_colored_glasses I_love_you ROFLMAO over_the_top scorning I_don't_care don't_worry The_good_stuff chill depressing rubbish potentially fight you_never_know yada_yada_yada delicious strip joke wazz_up_with_that whiner umm_the_other_answer over_the_top astounding Catastrophic_Success funny hobnob who_are_you_to_judge tattle_tale Zap you_think_you_could_do_better you'll_see IMHO think_you_could_do_better later Zap mundo_stoked well_obviously

I have been using Magento Enterprise Edition (EE) for 6months on a production sites in Europe and US, with total revenue so far exceeds a few million dollars. The reason I mention this is to give everybody a context of my comment and background. I work for a large company, so the money doesn't go to me.

To be fair, some of the features mentioned, for example abandoned cart reports, do exist in Magento EE. While some features like consumer profiling don't really belong to an eCommerce platform. Instead, those belong to CRM (consumer relationship management) tools. One of the reasons CRM is an independent system is a lot of shops have offline presence also, and lumping CRM features into eCommerce platform unnecessarily complicates things. There are extensions to sync between Magento and a few CRMs.

My wish list for Magento: built-in A/B testing, and multiple campaign management.

From the favicon on the site, looked like Drupal.