The Magento acquisition is certainly material(to quote from Tinker), but far from certain it will materialize as a threat to Shopify. In all the discussions I’ve seen or read I haven’t seen Or heard of Magento. That just probably means I’ve missed it or it hasn’t bubbled up to being seen as a mainstream threat.
It does appear they are thought of as an alternative.
https://www.websitebuilderexpert.com/shopify-alternatives-co……
But they appear to offer very different levels of merchant solutions.
Magento is one of the more powerful ecommerce platform available to you and is a worthy Shopify alternative.
However, as powerful as it is, know that it is an open source platform, meaning that it is not a “full service” ecommerce builder like Shopify or BigCommerce.
You can download and use Magento Community Edition for free, but you will have to be pretty tech savvy (know how to code), or hire a developer to help you put it all together.
You will have to manage all the moving pieces yourself, such as getting your own hosting services, configuring the tools, and there is no dedicated 24/7 there to help you if you need to troubleshoot any issues.
So it can be time and management intensive, and you will have to play the role of system administrator a lot of the times
The upside is that Magento is a very flexible ecommerce builder, and there aren’t that many limitations if you spend a lot of time and energy into building it out (or hire a very capable developer).
At the end of the day, if you are not tech savvy, don’t want to commit time to manage / maintain the technical aspects of your online store, or don’t have the budget to hire a good developer, Magento may not be the best option for you.
In such scenario, a hosted, fully serviced shopping cart software such as BigCommerce or Shopify will be a better option.
Magento is much more of a do it yourself platform as compared to Shopify, where they provide everything for you.
Perhaps that is why there is an extreme disconnect in revenue generation for the two companies. Magento has a large base generating $155B in gross merchandise volume on their platform in 2017. But in their conference call on the acquisition announcement Adobe disclosed that Magento only produced $150M in revenue.
https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/investor-re……
Compare that to Shopify with 2017 GMV of $26B and revenue of $673M. No need to do the math, Shopify completely blows away Magento for generating revenue from GMV.
A merchant who switched from Magento to Shopify tells their story here. I highly recommend looking this over, they provide a very detailed look at the differences and provide before and after screenshots. Again not even close comparison for the offerings Shopify brings.
https://www.ecommercefuel.com/shopify-vs-magento/
On another note, Adobe purchased TubeMogul a few years ago. TubeMogul is a demand side programmatic platform that competes directly with TTD. This acquisition has had no significant impact on TTD’s meteoric results. TTD keeps doing TTD things. It’s far too early to tell how this will impact SHOP, but my money is on SHOP to keep doing SHOP things.
Darth