Magento Commerce Cloud: Benefits & Downsides

But why should you even consider Magento Commerce Cloud as an option for your e-commerce store in the first place? What makes it any better than JetRails or Rackspace or even... Magento Commerce?

What are its biggest selling points?

And are there any reported downsides so far? Any drawbacks to consider and to weigh against its upsides before making your final choice?

Now, let's get you some answers:

1. What Is Magento Commerce Cloud? How Is It Different/Better than Magento Commerce?

Some might just reduce it to this basic formula:

Magento Commerce + bundled hosting (or cloud infrastructure)

Yet, I'm not one of “some”, so my definition would be:

It's a full-managed, automated hosting platform for Magento Commerce — the once Enterprise Cloud Edition — that ships with some additional powerful features.

Now, let me try and point out some of these features:

integrated source control management system (GIT), which translates into automatic build, deploy and management; it provides you with development, staging and live production environments
streamlined development cycle
quick and continuous deployment
entirely customizable components
enhanced security: the inherent security benefits of cloud computing + using WAS (Amazon Web Services) as the underlying infrastructure platform + tapping into the shared responsibility security model + leveraging the Fastly Web Application Firewall +...
continuous availability: a particularly important feature for online stores, with a huge impact on user experience, the overall traffic and the level of security that your eStore guarantees its customers

2. 10 Main Reasons Why You'd Want to Run It on Magento Commerce Cloud

Now, let's put its biggest selling points into the spotlight! Those benefits powerful enough to influence your decision and to make you opt for this cloud-powered e-commerce solution:

2.1. It's a Centralized Point of Management & End-to-End E-Commerce Solution

Of all the Magento Commerce Cloud features, this must be one of the most “luring” ones:

you get to orchestrate your whole “infrastructure” of online stores from one single centralized point/store
from marketing to analytics, to commerce across industries, it allows you to handle every specific operation, every aspect of the customer experience delivered on your e-commerce website

2.2. Inventory Order Management

No more “out of stock” scenarios.

At least not on your web store, since this feature allows you to always be one step ahead of customer demand and to... restock.

2.3. A Vast Ecosystem of Third-Party Extensions to Explore

Another one of Magento Commerce Cloud's biggest selling points is its impressive marketplace of extensions.

From:

Amazon Sales Channel
to Google's Smart Shopping
to lots of machine learning-based extensions

… you get to select from a huge ecosystem of add-ons to create a feature-rich, highly interactive shopping experience across your store.

2.4. It's Perfectly Equipped to Power Your PWAs

Thinking about reaching out also to those potential customers who don't (always) benefit from fast-speed internet connection? Thinking about building a PWA for your online store?

Good news: MCC is designed precisely with such a challenge in mind. It makes the best option for powering a PWA development plan.

2.5. High Scalability

The hosting platform's built to accommodate the needs of both big retailers and small e-commerce businesses.

And, in this respect, I should add 2 specific features that translate into enhanced scalability:

being a cloud environment, it grants you the freedom and the flexibility to allocate more memory and CPU, when needed
it ships with an ece-tools package

2.6. It Supports Intuitive Experiences for Both Store Admins and Customers

All the enhancements that Magento Commerce Cloud comes packed with bubble up to the user experience: both the “staff” user and the end-user.

Meaning that all the tasks included in the store management process and the shopping process are well thought-out to be... highly intuitive.

2.7. Designed to Power Multi-Site Architectures

Planning to go... global? Don't let your hosting platform stop you!

In this respect, Magento Commerce Cloud allows you to:

update an entire ecosystem of online stores from one centralized point (I know, I've already pointed out this powerful feature)
“conquer” new markets fast and surprisingly easy, with no major intervention from a tech-savvy team
tap into the local knowledge expertise that Magento provides and to create some highly personalized, ideally localized experiences for multiple audiences
exploit the advantage of the +150 languages available

And you get to run all your “globalization through localization” type of operations, to orchestrate your entire multi-site architecture, from one single point of management.

Note: speed and agility are 2 additional benefits that you can “reap” from using a cloud-based hosting platform; they become crucial when you want to enter new markets at high speed.

2.8. Built-in B2B Quote Management Feature

Just imagine: a tool incorporated into your hosting platform “in charge” with everything... quotation-related.

You can skip that time-consuming sequence of operations aimed at setting a price for a product.

2.9. Built-in Image Optimization Tool

Magento Commerce Cloud provides you, right out of the box, with a tool to optimize your images and to boost your page loading speed...

2.10. It Easily Integrates With Fully-Managed Services

Another great news is that it “plays well” with full managed services. From Redis to MySQL, to RabbitMQ, to Elasticsearch, it allows you to easily incorporate the service of your choice.

3. 3 Main Downsides Reported by Magento Commerce Cloud Users

For, although this managed platform is still relatively new and so we can't yet be talking about a whole “pile” of user reviews, the reported drawbacks gravitate around the same issues:

slow support
certain limitations of the underlying technology: Platform.sh
the need to invest time and effort to get everything live

3.1. Support... Could Be Better

Most of the Magento Commerce Cloud users have signaled it: support is slow. Therefore, expect to be put on a lengthy waiting list till you can actually get hold of a hosting engineer.

Do you need permission changes? Is there a hosting issue that you're “grappling with” and you need the support of someone with expertise in platform.sh?

You might need to invest a bit more time than predicted to get the support you need.

3.2. Running Updates and Upgrades Takes too Long

Not everyone's thrilled about the Platform.sh technology that MCC runs on.

Quite enough users have reported that each time they need to:

add new CSS
upgrade their e-commerce stores
run certain feature updates

… the underlying system takes too long to process. And, during all this time, their online stores are... down.

3.3. It Takes More to Get Everything Up and Running

More time and "X" times more effort. At least that's what some of the users say.

The END!

Does this answer your question(s)?

Are these benefits and drawbacks solid enough to help you decide whether Magento Commerce Cloud is the best option for your online store?

Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

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Is Magento Commerce Cloud the Best Option for Your E-Commerce Store? Key Benefits and Reported Downsides

1. What Is Magento Commerce Cloud? How Is It Different/Better than Magento Commerce?

2. 10 Main Reasons Why You'd Want to Run It on Magento Commerce Cloud