@ Leokoo #1 — I don’t think it’s fair to say Tom misrepresented any data. Nor does every dataset have to reference every other dataset. BuiltWith certainly doesn’t. It’s your job to understand any analysis is not gospel, but a view into data. Tom’s work gives another view and I’m it’s available.
@ Leokoo #2 — What about eCommerce experts like moi? I consult with billion dollar eCommerce empires like eBay and some others I can’t name publicly. My work has been a cover story for Internet Retailer and I speak regularly at eCommerce conferences about multi-device design. I think it’s safe to say I have a solid grasp on the eCommerce space.
Small to medium sized business (SMB) means $5M to $25M in revenue. A company with 50-250 employees better be making at least that much. Anything smaller is a micro-business. The scale is defined by true enterprises conducting well north of that.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_and_medium-sized_enterprises
Many (many) Magento implementations transact millions per month. The customers WooCommerce serves aren’t small they’re microscopic by comparison. It’s a very different market, and Magento isn’t competing with them.
SMBs and enterprise businesses have ERP integrations, tax compliance and reporting, CRM integration, marketing platforms, CDNs, multi-channel sales, operations and fulfillment logistics, and much more than a simple online store.
Having said that, Magento’s open-source community is very deep and offers the robustness of enterprise-level software for extremely minimal investment. There are tons of micro businesses using Magento and growing without any hiccups. Just wait till a WooCommerce store gets audited for PCI-DSS compliance — hint, it will fail.
The features you’re saying WooCommerce does better with plugins exist in Magento out-of-box. And what you’re saying is wrong with Magento can go equally wrong with third-party plugins for WooCommerce, Shopify, or any platform. Building solid applications is not easy or cheap. Businesses invest differently depending on their scale and goals.
Magento isn’t expensive to maintain, it’s the right price. Many extensions have annual licensing and businesses love that. Why? Because it means they’ll be supporting the product next year. That’s good for both businesses and how they grow together. You’re even complaining that WooCommerce changed their licensing to be sustainable (god forbid, Envato wakes up and follows suit), which real businesses (honestly) see as a positive not a negative.
@ Leokoo #3 — Magento has eBay backing it, and a huge resource in eBay Enterprise for growing an SMB. These things aren’t obvious to small shops because it’s a different world.
Nobody chooses platforms based on how many products it can hold. Servers are all commoditized and dirt cheap. This doesn’t differentiate platforms. While you’re touting WooCommerce for doing the basics of online commerce with plugins, remember that’s the minimum to transact.
Magento and ultimately any platform is only as strong as its ecosystem. WordPress is primarily hobbyist-driven and Magento is professional-driven. Sure somebody can build you a WooCommerce store for $150. But nobody builds you a WooCommerce store for $500,000. People do that with Magento. Believe me there are plenty of reasons as I stated above why it’s a better market fit for serious businesses (particularly those who aim to not only compete but succeed in the SMB or enterprise market).
What other advantages does Magento has, other than it being a native ecommerce solution? It is still based on PHP, and it takes up much more resources compared to WooCommerce, Prestashop and Opencart.