Magento for years has been the leading e-commerce platform preferred by online stores and digital retail stores all over the world. But Magento has its own constraints and drawbacks as well, especially following the release of Magento 2.0 and corresponding problems related to upgrading.
Fortunately, aspiring e-commerce stores now have a better alternative platform called NetSuite SuiteCommerce. Any e-commerce business frustrated with Magento and looking for a better alternative will find SuiteCommerce more suitable.
The difference between the two platforms is pretty vast. Magento is mainly concerned with e-commerce development and management while SuiteCommerce offers integrated ERP, CRM, POS, warehouse management, and inventory management tools. The availability of NetSuite eCommerce development tools to build your web store is worth counting as well.
Let us now compare the two e-commerce platforms, their key features, and offerings one by one.
Magento vs SuiteCommerce: Key-Value Propositions
As we have already explained, Magento is basically an e-commerce platform while SuiteCommerce is an integral part of the comprehensive ecosystem of tools and applications offered by NetSuite.
Magento is the leading e-commerce platform that offers a wide variety of features and capabilities ranging from order fulfillment, managing shopping carts, web store development, product catalogs, online marketing, content management, shipping, and SEO.
After the huge success of Magento 1.0, Magento 2.0 was released with a lot of value additions including more streamlined checkouts, a lot of performance enhancements, and a lot of valuable e-commerce features. Magento 2.0 also wins over several key shortcomings of the previous version including table locking, frequent reloads, limitation with a search function, etc.
Though the issues faced by Magento 1.0 were resolved to a great extent by Magento 2.0, the only problem that came up with the new release is the difficulties with upgrading from Magento 1.0 to Magento 2.0. The upgrading from one version to the other has not been as seamless as it should be. On the other hand, the support for the erstwhile Magento 1.0 version is waning leaving the lesser scope of getting official and community support
SuiteCommerce in complete contrast to Magento offers a much more unified e-commerce platform with close integration with all enterprise IT tools and apps from the NetSuite ecosystem. Without needing any third-party tools SuiteCommerce offers inbuilt support to operational systems like inventory management, order management, financial management, and customer support.
Coming from the NetSuite ecosystem of solutions and tools, SuiteCommerce gets direct integration with in-store Point of Sales (POS) solutions from NetSuite, inventory management, warehouse management, and ERP tools.
Most importantly, unlike the so-called e-commerce platforms like Magento, SuiteCommerce can run alongside multiple industry-specific tools and applications built by NetSuite. To shape your web store with a custom configuration of these tools you can also hire any of the leading NetSuite eCommerce development services.
Magento vs E-commerce: Functional Comparison
When it comes to the functional differences between the two platforms, the following attributes need to be considered.
Magento
- A compact and standalone e-commerce CMS platform
- Magento doesn’t offer integrated CRM, ERP, POS, inventory, and warehouse management.
- Magento on its own doesn’t offer financial management and reporting tools.
- It is not a robust and capable platform to allow managing multiple companies through the same dashboard.
- For most features, it looks up to the third-party tools.
NetSuite SuiteCommerce
- NetSuite is a robust and cloud-based ecosystem of tools and SuiteCommerce offers close integration with all these apps and tools.
- NetSuite SuiteCommerce offers ERP and CRM integration out of the box apart from the options to integrate modules for POS and warehouse management.
- SuiteCommerce provides comprehensive financial management and reporting tools and capabilities.
- SuiteCommerce also offers support to the consolidated multi-company management module.
Scalability
When it is about scalability in the frontend and backend to support evolving business requirements along with growth, Magento is less flexible as it relies on third-party tools for many features. NetSuite SuiteCommerce on the other hand, being a managed platform with everything integrated offers far more flexibility.
When it comes to real-time access to business and financial data, the power of the NetSuite ecosystem of tools and applications that NetSuite eCommerce integration can easily leverage, makes a huge difference.
Hosting
A major area of difference between the Magento Enterprise Edition and the SuiteCommerce platform is the website hosting. With all Magento editions including the enterprise edition, the online store needs to opt for a separate hosting service for the store. This apart from the cost concerns also enhances concerns over management and support.
In complete contrast to such self-managed hosting, SuiteCommerce offering complete cloud support just takes away the worries over hosting. This will help you avoid many issues that gradually emerge just because of managing the hosting solution.
Payments
Magento offers pretty much all payment methods that a web store want to integrate to allow their customers a lot of flexibility. But there is also a missing opportunity here. What about getting access to this huge transaction data that can be analyzed and managed by a great ERP tool?
When handling multiple payment methods utilizing the payment data while safeguarding the data security is also a major concern. This is exactly where NetSuite ERP integration coming packed with SuiteCommerce offers a better solution.
Website performance and speed
Finally, the performance and loading speed is a critical aspect for any e-commerce store simply because slow-loading web pages only deter business conversion and create a negative impact on your search ranking.
Obviously, Magento is pretty robust to allow you to build a superfast website with great performance. But for a lightning-fast Magento website you need to use an array of tools such as Content Delivery Network (CDN) and caching engine besides depending on the hosting service provider. From time to time you need to optimize the store by cleaning databases and logs, a few SQL configurations, index updating, and other optimization methods.
In complete contrast, with SuiteCommerce Advanced you can easily guarantee superfast website performance as all these aspects are taken care of from within the system and you get the power of fast-paced cloud hosting.
SuiteCommerce offers advanced architecture, integrated content delivery network (CDN) edge caching, and everything that helps boost performance. A NetSuite development partner can help you with the right configuration that works best for your store.
User Experience
Magento offering a regular e-commerce CMS solution doesn’t guarantee a consistent user experience since the website needs to depends on an array of Magento extensions and plugins. Making things more problematic, many Magento extensions for integrating with the website demands good command on PHP and MySQL apart from some exposure to troubleshooting for getting rid of the eventual bugs. So, Magento e-commerce stores ideally should have onboard expert Magento developers.
NetSuite SuiteCommerce in this respect offers a frictionless user experience quite unconditionally. Just because of offering an integrated suite of tools such as NetSuite ERP, CRM, and POS, the website never experiences any issues in respect of compatibility.
Revenue Potential or ROI
Now let us have a deeper look at the cost versus revenue potential of Magento and NetSuite SuiteCommerce. When you use CMS solutions like Magento, making an assessment of the total cost of development can be very complicated as it involves third-party integrations and IT management costs. So, apart from the licensing fee, there are several cost factors that you need to take into account.
Considering all the cost factors, efforts, and long term management costs, you actually can find Suitecommerce as a more cost-competitive solution that ensures offering a lot more while ensuring everything that facilitates easier business conversion. This is why, in terms of Revenue on Investment (ROI), NetSuite Suitecommerce can be a better choice.
Conclusion
Any e-commerce business wants to give more time in selling than managing the IT infrastructure. This is exactly why managed e-commerce solutions with all integrated tools like NetSuite Suitecommerce are continuing to gain popularity. Suitecommerce offers a far better value proposition than any e-commerce CMS platform.
