Adobe, the digital experience software pioneer, has recently announced its intent to acquire Magento, the leading ecommerce solution (and already an Adobe partner) for a sum of $1.06 billion. Magento, which recently turned 10, was purchased by eBay in 2011 for $180 million, after which the company went private again in 2015.
Impact on ecommerce
This acquisition opens up new avenues for innovation across every aspect of ecommerce and will power up the consumer experience more than ever before. The aim is to combine Magento Commerce Cloud with the Adobe Experience Cloud and deliver a single platform which serves both B2C and B2B customers and offers a highly personalized and shoppable experience at every moment.
There are, however, no official plans or statements regarding how the Magento platform will be treated after the acquisition. Therefore, we can only speculate the new capabilities that Adobe Experience Cloud will gain with Magento. They include:
- Unified Shopping Experiences: Allows transactions anywhere, anytime with integrated fulfillment and customer engagement to the store.
- Greater Personalization: Enhances the customer journey with rich, personalized experiences between channels (web, mobile, retail store) in a single, cost-effective, scalable platform.
- Unparalleled Innovation and Business Agility: Provides sales and marketing teams with real-time personalization, insights and analytics while simultaneously testing game-changing innovations to stay ahead of consumer demand.
- Common Architecture: Single tenancy control gives customers the freedom to create highly differentiated digital brand experiences.
The Adobe-acquired Magento solution will enable merchants to design and deliver a consistent and transformative experience across all channels. With Adobe’s expertise in the sphere of design and visual content, this union will extend Magento’s capabilities, surpassing design and delivery of digital experiences. Both B2B and B2C ecommerce merchants will get optimal opportunities to transform their businesses.
Impact on the ecosystem
Magento has an active community of 300,000 developers, 800 technology partners and 350+ system integration partners. With this acquisition, Adobe will get access to the ever-growing, vibrant community. Together, Adobe and Magento are taking a huge step forward to help businesses fulfill their commerce vision!
Mark Lavelle, CEO, Magento Commerce, in a recent blog on the Magento official website, talks about Magento’s future together with Adobe and promises to deliver developer-driven experiences and empower the communities to create more unified experiences across the customer journey. He looks forward to:
- Enable ecommerce businesses to deliver compelling digital experiences.
- Enhance customer engagement across every touchpoint.
- The ability to transact anywhere across the entire ecommerce experience of a visitor.
The competitive landscape
The Adobe – Magento acquisition has an effect on the competitive landscape of digital ecommerce platforms. Soon after the announcement, some of the competitors’ stock prices took a hit.
Although, platforms catering to the small and mid-sized businesses will be happy to see Magento join hands with the enterprise-focused Adobe, only time will give us the verdict. The main question lies in the pricing aspect, as the biggest impact will be on the existing Magento customers if the license costs shoot up drastically. In that case, they will have to move to alternative platforms.
Will the purchase be beneficial for all customers and not just Enterprise ones? I guess we will just have to wait and watch!
But one thing for sure, the Adobe-Magento partnership will definitely shape the future of ecommerce and address the entire spectrum of needs of digital businesses.
Now, you can easily connect your Magento Store with the back-end ERP/CRM System to automate the business process!
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