Now is the time to invest in Magento

Magento has recently been acquired by eBay and the news have shaken the entire eCommerce industry. Businesses that grew around the Magento ecosystem are worried (again) – but do they need to?

Back a year ago or so

eBay was the first and only investor in Magento, taking over a minority stake of the company (49%). Following the investment there was a lot of worries and rant throughout the Magento community. Users want a platform that’s reliable, transparent and open source and developers want a predictable roadmap. In short, people don’t like risks.

Since eBay’s first investment, Magento only grew bigger and bigger and its ecosystem has only become more profitable. This is good news for everybody – if Magento and eBay make money – they’ll keep investing in the platform which in turns will attract more publicity and traction. And that means more business for 3rd party developers and better products for end users.

Today with eBay, Paypal and X.commerce

Now with the new Xcommerce plans, people are questioning whether or not it’s a good time to stick with Magento.

For sure there’s a risk. How will the eBay acquisition influence my Magento business? Should I invest more in the platform or rather look to diversify my focus? Is it worth it to develop new products for Magento? But where there’s risk there’s also potential – in fact the greater the potential, the greater the risk. Potential and risk often go together.

If you’re in the Magento industry today and are able to establish yourself, this can mean great success down the road as Magento’s audience continues to widen and you’ll be in a privileged position to leverage the new Magento/eBay future offerings.

So as @magentist tweeted recently “stop worrying about eBay, Xcommerce, Magento 2, and what not! There’s never been a better time to invest in Magento so get back to work .”

I run a Magento business that’s made of several branches including Ultimento and Magentist and we focus entirely on the free and open source Community Edition of Magento. We’ve been with Magento since the very beginning back in 2008  and when the paid editions came out, I made a decision to only support the CE – at least for a while. We grew our business around the CE and the market grew so steadily that we didn’t feel threatened at all by the other Magento offerings. Quite the opposite! Today we’re more successful than ever and the new acquisition of Magento by eBay is actually helping bring ever more users on board with Magento. I see it in our sales every day and I bet the trend is only going to continue!

Read more about how the Magento community is reacting to the acquisition:

• Magento, X.commerce & the community comments on the webshopapps.com blog
• eBay acquires Magento – comments on the inchoo.net blog