Magento 1.9, and in fact all Magento 1 versions, have reached their end of life and will no longer receive any quality updates or security fixes. All Magento 1 users are encouraged to move away to another version or an alternate platform. If you’re looking for a customizable, scalable, open-source E-Commerce platform for the years to come, then Spree Commerce 4.1 might be a good fit for your project.

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As of June 2020, Magento Open Source 1 will no longer receive any support or software security patches. If you’re using any third-party extensions or customizations these might be already unsupported as “maintenance of extensions, customization or other modifications to the Magento codebase, including compliance with security and privacy standards (PCI, SOC, ISO, etc.), are the express responsibility of the merchant.”

Let’s discuss what lies ahead.

Re-platforming concerns and opportunities

Obviously, the main reason for moving away from Magento 1 is its end of life.

But there could possibly be other reasons to leave Magento 1 behind, such as:

• customization constraints introduced by your Magento theme
• complicated Magento admin dashboard which your store staff does not love
• a patchwork of 3rd party modules used to customize Magento to your needs
  • each requiring separate upgrades and maintenance
  • some of them not available for Magento 2
• Magento promo engine issues: “Catalog Price Rule don’t work”
• Magento checkout 50x errors
• Magento products pages showing 404 errors
• Magento caching issues

Here are some of the Magento forum issues with thousands of page views but very little answers:

Concerns you might be having before moving away from Magento 1:

• you’d have to leave behind all of the investment already made into Magento 1 platform
• and you’d have to spend more time and money on your new platform
• so you’d like your new platform to address the challenges of the old one
• and you’d like your new platform to be affordable
• the transition process shouldn’t take too long
• you’d like to migrate your historical data: products, orders, users
• you’d like to preserve your Google rankings and redirect your old URLs to new ones

Moving to Spree might be an opportunity to start fresh and leverage benefits Spree brings while addressing the most painful Magento 1.x issues and bottlenecks. At the same time, you could keep all your historical data and Google search results traffic.

So when moving to Spree might make sense?

How is Spree different than Magento?

The most important difference is that Spree Commerce is built using Ruby on Rails while Magento is built using PHP. Software development experts agree that Ruby on Rails is great for MVP development, quick iterations and scaling your business. It’s simple, more elegant and automates many repetitive developer tasks, so the apps you build are easier and cheaper to maintain while bringing more job satisfaction to your dev team. Which is important in the long term.

Late last year, Y Combinator, an accomplished investment fund and startup incubator, has published a list of its top 100 graduate companies ranked by valuation as of October 2019. 8 out of 10 most valued companies in the ranking built their online platforms using Ruby on Rails.

4 Ruby on Rails powered marketplace platforms – Airbnb, Doordash, Instacart, Postmates – gross 76% of all merchandise sold (GMV) by all top 100 marketplace platforms on the Andreessen Horowitz “Marketplace 100”, a ranking of the largest and fastest-growing private consumer-facing multi-vendor marketplace E-Commerce websites.

In addition, 2 out of 10 fastest-growing marketplace platforms in the Andreessen Horowitz Marketplace 100 ranking were built using Ruby on Rails.

All of these fast-growing businesses using Ruby on Rails can’t be wrong.

For what use cases Spree might be a good fit?

Popular technical use cases:

• A custom-built online store – is your Magento store customized to your product or unique business processes?
• Headless E-Commerce – do you run a decoupled Javascript frontend with a Magento backend?
• Multi-store dashboard – would you like to manage multiple stores, locations, languages, currencies?
• Multi-tenant platform – would you like to host an E-Commerce platform for multiple tenants or stores?
• React.js frontend app – are you enthusiastic about smooth Facebook-like UX?
• PWA frontend app – are you looking for a native app-like UX but with a web reach and audience?

Popular business use cases:

• Contextual Commerce – would you like to combine blog content with shoppable products and cart on a single page?
• Unified Retail & Online – would you like to sell online and offline allowing in-store pickup and returns, track and transfer inventory across multiple stock locations?
• International E-Commerce – would you like to sell in multiple countries, currencies, languages from a single platform and dashboard?
• Multi-vendor marketplace – would you like to onboard multiple vendors with their product catalogs, each with their own vendor panel and allow users to purchase items from any number of vendors with a single payment?
• B2B or B2B2C E-Commerce – would you like to sell wholesale or grow your network of resellers and distributors?
• Subscription E-Commerce – would you like to grow your repeat business with recurring billing and user-driven billing configuration?

9 reasons to move from Magento to Spree

The latest Spree version brings long-term value to the users, business stakeholders and developers:

• USER EXPERIENCE
  • Truly mobile-first. Smooth UX on any device: iPhone, Android, iPad or desktop.
  • Amazing page load speed and SEO. Google will love it and so will your customers – both old and new.
  • Fully featured E-Commerce platform. Rich UX, omni-channel, international sales and more.
• BUSINESS VALUE
  • Short time-to-market. launch in a week. Install, customize, configure and start selling.
  • Open-source: you own it. Self-hosted and fully-owned platform. And it’s free!
  • Flexibility for future growth and scaling. Start lean, test the market and then scale as you grow.
• SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
  • PCI compliance. Available payment gateways enable full PCI-DSS compliance.
  • Secure authentication and authorization. Strong password encryption, token-based REST API and more.
  • Mature underlying technology. Built-in Ruby on Rails framework security features.

Spree Commerce in 2020

Spree, similarly to Magento, is a self-hosted open-source E-commerce platform built with Rails 6 with a modern UX, optional PWA frontend, REST API, GraphQL (under construction), several official extensions and 3rd party integrations. Over 1 million downloads and counting! 

Check out Spree:

• Join Spree Slack – 4200+ members
• Review Spree UX slides – slide deck + more
• Review Spree guides – admin + dev docs
• See Spree on Github – dev dashboard

For Ruby on Rails and JavaScript developers the Spree ecosystem is a set of building blocks allowing them to quickly respond to business needs:

• Spree 4.1 now has a brand new, blazing-fast UX reducing time-to-market to weeks or even days
• Spree backend is using APIs to talk to multiple frontend apps…
• …built with any tech-stack you like!
• Spree is also an excellent headless engine for several use cases and omnichannel projects…
• …like selling through a custom JS storefront, a WordPress page, a mobile app.

Get in touch for a free discovery call and a re-platforming quote

If you’re looking for a long-term, scalable, open-source E-Commerce platform with solid community support and a network of reliable development partners, feel free to reach out to get a free re-platforming quote. We’ll connect you with a trusted Spree development partner.

Keep in touch!

Vendo marketplace platform frees you from the burden of self-hosting and maintenance. Contact us now for a demo and launch an eCommerce platform at a fraction of a typical cost and within weeks instead of months.