Questions
I have a bunch of question about Magento and your services. It looks like you have a pretty nice integration between Counterpoint and Magento. Do you guys help with migration if I decide to use your services? Can the live site stay live while the configuration and testing happen on a new host before the move? Why do other hosted solutions greatly limit the extensions that can be used? Will we run into that as well, or can we use any Magento approved extension? Is your connector charge in addition to your hosting and support charges?
I have to be honest with you, I don't understand why all of this needs to be so hard.
Answers
Thank you for your interest in Modern Retail; let me see if I can answer your questions.
- Do you guys help with migration if I decide to use your services?
- Yes, absolutely! We'll help you with website and data migration.
- Can the live site stay live while the configuration and testing happen on a new host before the move?
- Yes, we would get your new website running on a staging server so you could take a look, and we could make sure everything works before flipping the switch.
- Why do other hosted solutions greatly limit the extensions that can be used? Will we run into that as well, or can we use any Magento approved extension?
- This is the ugly little secret of Magento. End users see all these great extensions in the Magento marketplace, and they start salivating. They want them all and think they can simply click, download and install them. Unfortunately, this is not true. There are oftentimes dependencies between extensions, and installing one may break another extension. Additionally, I’ve seen clients install so many extensions that it brings the performance of their website to its knees. I’m not saying you can’t use extensions, you just need to be careful which ones you use and not go too crazy. The more extensions you install, the more complex you’re making your website. If you’re making 5 million a year online, this is probably no big deal, but if you’re making say $500,000 per year, you might want to be a little more careful. To give you an idea of what I mean, Magento released a security patch in October 2015, SUPEE-6788. This patch not only affected Magento but nearly every extension that was installed on our clients’ Magento sites. We spent a lot of time installing this patch and cleaning up all these extensions. You can read more about it here: https://support.modernretail.com/hc/en-us/articles/212194698-Magento-Security-Patch-Malware-Alert-October-2015
- Is your connector charge in addition to your hosting and support charges?
- Yes, the monthly cost of our Counterpoint Integrator is in addition to the monthly hosting and support charge. However, the setup fee would be "baked" into a larger project’s setup fee.
Can I ask you a question? Are you sure Magento is the right platform for you? You may not be aware of this, but we can get Counterpoint integrated with Bigcommerce, Shopify and WooCommerce as well.
Just thought I’d ask just in case no one has asked you this question before. Thanks.