Ebay is to close their hosted Magento Go e-commerce package on the 1st February 2015 and have closed the site to new businesses. The announcement was made by Mark Lavelle, SVP, Product and Strategy, eBay Enterprise on the home page of the service this week.
Magento Go is a service that provides businesses access to a cut down version of Magento fully hosted by Ebay. Pricing was based on the number of products. While the lower tiers were quite reasonably priced once product counts rose over 100 the price quickly escalated. We always felt this offered businesses poor value for money. It also allowed only limited opportunities for businesses to customise the functionality of their Magento store.
Dear Magento Go Merchants
We’ve made the difficult decision to shut down Magento Go on February 1, 2015. Your store will not be affected during the Holiday shopping season – it will continue to operate and perform normally, and Magento will continue to provide customer service until February 1, 2015.
Over the past five years we’ve had the opportunity to work with thousands of merchants and have been humbled to be a part of so many success stories. Going forward, we’re focusing our resources on Magento Enterprise Edition and Magento Community Edition, two solutions that better support and better equip small and medium size merchants to prosper in the evolving and increasingly competitive eCommerce landscape.
Please be sure to take advantage of the checklists, planning resources and special offers found in the Migration Center to help smooth your transition to a new eCommerce solution.
Thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you.
Sincerely,
Mark Lavelle, SVP, Product and Strategy, eBay Enterprise
We would suggest that any merchants affected by this change start to explore moving to hosted Magento Community / Enterprise straight away rather than wait till after this Christmas period. Moving to a hosted solution will give you far more flexibility. If you are worried about managing your own hosting.. don’t. Every Magento hosting package we offer is fully managed and supported and will certainly be cheaper than Magento Go.
Check out our Magento Shared hosting packages which are idea for smaller merchants.