Magento Rebranded As a Proprietary SaaS Offering By Multi-Billion Dollar Entity

[bob_jones3]

I have stumbled across a very large entity who has taken Magento 1 Community, edited the core files, & has rebranded it as their own proprietary SaaS offering. They currently have over 500 customers each with individual sites using their services. The customers have no idea they are even on Magento, so have no access to community of developers, extensions, source code, or anything for that matter.

I have links to over 350 of these sites as well as one of their contracts where it states that if a customer stops paying the monthly subscription that they will lose all access to their sites.

I believe this is fraud on a massive scale & would like to know if a news outlet would report on this as these customers need to know the truth. Also, actions such as this are detrimental to the Magento Community and all who support it. 

[Mukesh Tiwari]

Hi @bob_jones3 

I suggest you to contact @sherrie .You can send her a personal message on forums with the information.

[Robert Rand]

There are existing platforms that forked off of Magento 1, like Zoey, and new contenders on the way, like Mage-One. 

I don't know of any that are in the multi-billion dollar range, but Zoey has not been a secret to the Magento team or the community at large, although I'm not how Mage-One fits with Magento's open source licensing just yet.

Zoey users can leverage resources from the Magento Community. That includes integrations via Magento 1's APIs. There are also opportunity to custom integrate M1 Extensions. Like most SaaS platforms (think Shopify, BigCommerce), the average user doesn't go the custom route. They user pre-integrated extensions.

However, any developer can technically support a Zoey customer within the confines of which resources are made available to edit, and lots of members of the Magento community have partnered with Zoey. That includes agencies like Razoyo, integrators like nChannel, and apps like ShipperHQ.

Additionally, the Zoey team contributes back to the Magento Community. Here's an example right here on the forums: https://community.magento.com/t5/Magento-1-x-Technical-Issues/Authorize-net-Gateway-Errors-without-M...

Have you run across something else?

[bob_jones3]

Thanks @Robert Rand for the detailed reply.

Yes, this is something else entirely as the 500+ customers have no access to the Magento Community or any 3rd party apps/developers. 

I had a conversation with one of the customers who is a very successful retailer in the brick & mortar world (over 20 locations & 100 million in offline revenue) about what platform they are really on & all the "apps" that are blocked from them. He stopped me mid-sentence & said "when you say apps I think of something for a phone."

This just goes to show you how sheltered these customers are as they don't even know that other 3rd party solutions/apps exist as they are not made available with the "Proprietary Platform" (Magento Community) they are on.

The entity in question is not a technology company by trade like a Zoey or Mage-one & "web services" is not their core business model, so I simply believe they got some bad information along the way & are playing around in a world they don't understand or belong. 

Just looking for feedback on this. 

[Robert Rand]

I've actually seen businesses use one instance of Magento (including M1 EE) to "resell" stores. The merchants knew that it was Magento, but they couldn't bring in outside vendors, which typically didn't work well.

NCR, a huge company, used to offer eCommerce stores built on Magento 1 that they wouldn't let other developers code for. You could only use particular [approved] extensions. It was tough to work with those stores, even for digital marketing. Just getting a product feed set up or getting tracking codes integrated was an uphill battle.

Open Source licensing and legal questions aside, I like merchants being left with choice. Ideally, they'll own their sites, although I do understand why some, especially in the SMB market, would choose a SaaS solution. 

I'm not familiar with the entity that you're describing, but I'd agree that it's contrary to my ideals.

The devil's advocate argument that I've seen some of these companies make is that they cater to users that couldn't handle the time and costs of hosting, securing, managing, and maintaining a Magento store for themselves, so this is a way to give users a more powerful platform (even if they don't get access to its full extensibility) at a price and under terms that they can be successful with... but most of these examples don't hide that you're getting a Magento store.

Going back to your specific example about a merchant not knowing what eCommerce apps means... this sounds like willful ignorance.

If you're a $100 million business with 20 stores, and you don't hire a qualified eCommerce manager/director/VP/InsertTitleHere, and you don't have anyone in your marketing team that's experienced enough in eCommerce marketing to understand that their hands are being tied and something is wrong, I think the problem is bigger than the vendor. A business of that size should have gone through a better research phase before winding up on a black-box platform and should know the pros and cons of their decision. If they were opening a 21st location, they'd hire a manager and competent staff for that store. Opening an online store is no different.

Additionally, at that scale, there's no reason not to attend local if not national trade shows, like IRCE, and get access to experts and knowledge. 

I believe that while vendors should be reputable if you're not going to take your eCommerce sales channel seriously, you're at a high risk of a situation like the one you described... but in relative terms, yes, I'd primarily blame the vendor if they're abusing an open-source license rather than the victim who got short-changed.