Magento Pro Edition

For a long time now developers have been aware of the free Community Edition of Magento alongside the slightly more advanced, support-filled and maddeningly expensive Enterprise Edition. Well, now Varien are proud to announce the arrival of the ‘Pro Edition‘. Before you start thinking that this is simply a version of Magento to be used by advanced golfers, the Professional Edition has a lot to offer to boost the sales of your store.

With a sleek new look and several unique features incorporated to justify the $2,995/yr price tag, the Pro edition sits neatly halfway between the other two.

While the community edition puts all the groundwork in place for you to run a successful and usable store, the Professional Edition brings in several new marketing techniques important for driving sales at your new store. This makes the package as a whole a lot more advanced, closer to the abilities of Internet mega-giants such as Amazon. In the words of the Magento team themselves, you can:

• Increase Customer Retention with the Reward Points module
• Increase Revenue with the ability to sell Gift Certificates/Cards
• Increase Customer Service and Satisfaction with the Customer Store Credit module
• Increase Security and Peace of Mind with Enhanced Data Encryption

In my opinion, these are features that should be included in the Community edition as standard, particularly the increased data encryption which now brings the software safely into PA-DSS standards, where it kinda should have been in the first place. The gift certificates and reward points modules are nice – as long as your store becomes big enough to get a consistent and rewarding user base from it.

It seems the Pro’s main objective is to look after the customers a whole lot more than the Community does – after-all the most important thing about any store is the well-being of its customers. However, at $2,995 a year – is Magento looking after its customers enough? Keep checking back to the Magento blog at Ecommerce Website Design to find out!