few questions regarding magento

[systemengr810c]

Kindly guide me regarding the followings.

1. magento enterprise vs magento enterprise cloud difference ? is it that cloud is hosted on was by magento and we don't need to pay for that ? in the case of magento enterprise (beside paying $22000) we need to manage hosting our selves?

2. Can magento enterprise integrated the factory orders details and maintain supply chain along with analysis reports view on dashboard for admin?

3. how much a good developer charge for making a highly featured magento store and how much time is required ?

4. instead of purchasing Magento enterprise cloud, can we purchase magento enterprise and host it in cloud our selves ? this way i might save some money?

[Robert Rand · Accepted solution]

Magento Open Source (aka. Magento Community Edition/Magento CE) is free, open-source software.

Adobe Commerce (aka. Magento Commerce/Magento Enterprise/Magento EE) is indeed the licensed version of Magento. It includes a variety of extra features. There is no published list price. The Adobe sales team quotes licenses on request based on factors like your eCommerce revenue. So, your quote may be quite different from the $22,000 you mentioned. Many users are hosting this with Magento hosting providers for a wide variety of reasons. When they do so, the license is typically referred to as Adobe Commerce On-Prem.

Adobe Commerce Cloud (aka. Magento Commerce Cloud/MCC) is Adobe Commerce, with cloud hosting provided as part of the licensing fee. These days, the Adobe sales team typically tries to bundle this cloud hosting for most users by default. So, if you'd prefer an On-Prem license where you'll select your own host, you'll need to negotiate that. Depending on the goals of Adobe's sales team and your negotiating skills, you may or may not save a lot of money.

It's advisable to compare/contrast services between On-Prem hosting providers and Adobe Commerce Cloud hosting. There are differences when it comes to support layers, included tools, and capabilities. Since these aren't "apples to apples" hosting solutions, they shouldn't be compared on pricing alone.

There are many great Magento development agencies. Depending on the particulars of your project, most Adobe Commerce (ie. Enterprise) projects will start in the $20,000 to $50,000 range, and go up from there. Some of the Adobe Commerce agency partners offer Rapid Launch packages. I've actually researched this topic and shared my notes, including many of the starting prices: https://jetrails.com/blog/magento-2-launch-accelerators/

When it comes to building a more highly featured site as you described, I've certainly seen sites require significantly larger budgets for heavy customizations. Easily into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's all about the scope of the project. Often, using existing Magento Extensions can help to minimize custom development.

For integrating data from vendors and others in a supply chain, I recommend having a more thorough discussion with the dev agencies that you reach out to. Depending on what other systems you're using (ex. ERP), how data needs to be transmitted (ex. API, EDI, or CSV), and other factors, the answer may be different. It's not unusual to integrate a separate order management system, ERP, or inventory management system, rather than trying to rely on Magento for the equivalent functionality. 

Best of luck!

[systemengr810c]

Thanks a lot Sir for the detailed reply.

You have cleared many confusions.

Two more things Sir if you please spare a few more minutes

1. If I go for magento enterprise , when does the license price starts, before starting development , or we can develop online store or magento enterprise for free and once we are going to deploy then licensing fee will start ?

2. Does magento 2 give us the feature of factory & warehouse management & their integration to the online store. such that an order created by admin can land on factory panel , where upon processing , shipment is sent to corresponding country warehouse, once reached admin can just confirm it and all the products with stock can directly merge to the online products stock. no need to manually update stock. as it was done while creating the order.

if it does not give then what options do we have , write own custom developed code in php and integrate it with online store ?

[Robert Rand]

Historically, Magento/Adobe has required you to start paying licensing fees before you begin developing your website. That has generally meant that you pay for the software license immediately, even if it winds up taking you a long time to launch.

This is something that I recommend bringing up with the Adobe sales team. They may be able to offer some kind of deal, like a few extra months on your initial license to help give you the extra ramp-up time that you need. As they frequently change pricing strategies, the only way to know is to ask/negotiate to see what you're eligible for at the time that you need a license.

For inventory management, Magento open-source and Adobe Commerce both have a multi-source-inventory feature set. I'd highly recommend looking at it to see if it's a match for your needs: https://docs.magento.com/user-guide/catalog/inventory-management.html

Typically, if you want people in different warehouses to be routed orders that they can pick, pack, and ship, including scanning barcodes on items, and printing shipping labels, you're going to use a more robust inventory/order/warehouse management system.

There are extensions available to add to this feature set, like:

https://marketplace.magento.com/amasty-module-advanced-msi.html

https://marketplace.magento.com/amasty-module-dropshipping-dealers.html

If you need something even more advanced, you can discuss it with the Adobe sales team. They were selling a SaaS addon called Magento Order Management (MOM) that may still be available: https://omsdocs.magento.com/getting-started/. However, I've known a lot of users to select best-in-class solutions that integrate with Magento like SkuVault and Veeqo.