Prepare for Magento 1 End of Life

It's decision time for merchants... don't get caught without a plan

[transcript]

Hi. My name is Paul Byrne, and I’m the president of Razoyo. And I’m here to talk to you today about the end-of-life for Magento 1: the June 2020 date that everybody has been talking about in the Magento world.

If you’ve been involved in e-commerce at all over the past 10 years, you’re aware of Magento. It’s changed the landscape. It’s an amazing piece of software that allows you to manage a store with just one piece of software. You can manage your catalog, mange your customer accounts, even manage payment and shipping information all in one place, which is what has made it so popular.

Magento was first launched in the 2007 timeframe. But by 2012, the creators of Magento had realized that the stack needed to be updated, that the internet was evolving at such a pace that a new version was going to be needed, and was going to be needed soon. And by 2016, Magento had released an initial version of the Magento 2 software.

Shortly after that, they announced an end-of-service date of October 2018. This caused quite a stir in the Magento community, and in the e-commerce community overall. Developers realized that the software was buggy, that it needed some features to be added. And merchants realized, at the same time, that the cost of ownership of Magento 2 was much, much higher than Magento 1. In many cases, two to three times higher. So, the community and the developers overall were just not going to be ready. And so, Magento pushed the release date to June 2020, and that’s the current date. And it looks like that one is going to stick.

Magento pushed the release date to June 2020, and that’s the current date. And it looks like that one is going to stick.

So, what does end-of-service mean?

End-of-service is simply when Magento is going to stop pushing updates for security to Magento versions 1.5 through 1.9.

Now, I’m talking about the Community Edition. If you have the Enterprise Edition, the timeframe is essentially the same. Although, I do know that there have been some exceptions made for larger Enterprise clients. But in general, that June 2020 date means, “We’re going to stop getting security patches for Magento 1.”

So, what do these security patches do?

Well, security patches keep hackers from getting sensitive information. And where do the holes in security come from that require these security patches? The holes comes from newly found exploits in PHP, which is one of the underlying technologies in Magento, and also within the Magento code itself, as well as other things around the internet like new security protocols, and so forth.

So, should you be concerned?

Yes, you should absolutely be concerned. Magento sites, because they’re e-commerce sites and they take sensitive and payment information, are among the most highly targeted for security breaches by hackers. So, you have to be really concerned about it because you need to keep your site secure. You may even lose your payment processor, but we’ll talk more about what end-of-service means in terms of what the consequences could be for you in another video.

you should absolutely be concerned. Magento sites, because they’re e-commerce sites and they take sensitive and payment information, are among the most highly targeted for security breaches by hackers.

Basically, what this means for merchants is that it’s decision time. If you’re on Magento 1, Magento 1 is not going to be a safe platform in the near-future.

So, what are your options?

Well, it might be just upgrading to a version of Magento 2. But you even have to make a choice there because your choice of platform on Magento now has a lot of different flavors and a lot of different options than you had before, including Magento Cloud, and other options.

Second of all, you could move to a new platform. Going from Magento 1 to Magento 2 is not an upgrade. That word is a misnomer, and I wish we would stop using it. Magento 1 to Magento 2 is a re-platforming. And while Magento had helped by providing some of the tools, it’s still an enormous amount of work to make the upgrade. It takes planning, it takes time, and it takes developer resources.

So, if you’re going to invest that kind of money in moving to Magento 2 or moving off of Magento 1, you should really look around, because chances are the landscape has changed since you put your store in Magento in the first place. There are SaaS solutions, like BigCommerce, which have really evolved in this open SaaS model, and they’re far more customizable than they were in the past. There are solutions like OroCommerce, which is very well designed for business-to-business. It’s not an e-commerce solution with business-to-business features: it’s an e-commerce solution that was designed specifically for business-to-business operations. Something to consider there as well.

But no matter what your choice is, you need to start. You need to take some time, figure out what you need, and figure out your business strategy. Your choice of your next platform should be driven by your business strategy, and not the other way around, which we see in so many merchants who choose a platform, and that highly influences their strategy.

Your choice of your next platform should be driven by your business strategy, and not the other way around

So, think through your options. If you’re interested, give Razoyo a call. We would love to give you an opportunity to discuss with us, on a free consultation, your Magento 1 end-of-life situation and your potential next project.

Thanks very much, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.