Web-based e-commerce platform Magento Inc. today opened its Magento Marketplace to merchants using the open source e-commerce platform’s older Magento 1.0 platform.
Magento in April launched Marketplace, a forum where Magento merchants can access e-retail services from vendors vetted by Magento. Magento Marketplace is a new iteration of the earlier Magento Connect and is designed to be a quick way for merchants to add functionality to their sites such as social media plug-ins, personalization tools and payments services, without having to code from scratch. Unlike Magento Connect, all extensions in Magento Marketplace undergo a vetting process and code review, Magento says. However, until today, only merchants using Magento 2.0, the newest iteration of Magento which launched in November 2015, could access and use Magento Marketplace.
Magneto says 246,000 merchants use the Magento 1.0 free Community edition and 6,600 merchants pay for the Magento 1.0 Enterprise edition. Additionally, 7,000 merchants use both the Community and Enterprise editions of Magento 2.0 combined.
Developers who list their products and services in the Magento Marketplace pay a 30% commission from each sale to Magento. Some extensions are free, and in those cases developers pay nothing, Magento says. Magento Marketplace currently offers 750 tools and services from vendors.
Magento spun off from eBay Inc. in November 2015. David Geisinger, head of product marketing for Magento, said in August that Magento had added 300 paying clients to the roster of those using the more robust Magento Enterprise edition since becoming an independent company. In April, Magento debuted a cloud-based e-commerce platform option. Retailer clients paying for Magento’s Enterprise software, and the merchants who use the free Community edition must pay for and transition to Magento’s latest 2.0 software to obtain the cloud service.
Artsy online marketplace The Grommet, No. 447 in the Internet Retailer 2016 Top 1000, began using Magento in 2010 and has posted about a 40% growth in web sales each year since. A big benefit of Magento is the ease of adding plug-ins or extensions from the Magento Marketplace, says Derek Sanford, The Grommet’s vice president of technology. For example, The Grommet uses Magento extensions for its email marketing and payment processing, as well as for social network extensions including Pinterest.
Magento provides a range of services to more than 200 merchants ranked in the Internet Retailer Top 1000. In the Internet Retailer 2017 Leading Vendors to the Top 1000, which ranks the top players in each of 30 technology categories by the number of e-retailers in the Top 500 and Second 500 that they serve, Magento takes home top marks in several categories. It ranks No. 1 in terms of the number of Top 1000 retail clients for the following categories: e-commerce platform (202 Top 1000: 54 Top 500 retailers and 148 Second 500), content management (189 Top 1000: 50 Top 500, 139 Second 500), mobile commerce (189 Top 1000: 52 Top 500 and 137 Second 500) and order management (192 Top 1000: 54 Top 500 and 138 Second 500).
Magento’s e-commerce platform retail clients include bigger players such as Best Buy Co. Inc. (No. 12) and smaller merchants including NorthShore Care Supply (No. 514) and Vertana Group (No. 522). Magento says its global clients process more than $50 billion in online sales annually.