Scalable, But Difficult For Beginners – Our Adobe Commerce Review

Adobe Commerce is a free, open-source software that allows businesses to create unique, tailored B2B and B2C experiences. Especially ideal for businesses with multiple brands, Adobe Commerce is among the best ecommerce website builders; a powerful, feature-rich piece of kit with huge potential, it’s already used by around 20% of the world’s ecommerce businesses.

‘Great, sign me up!’, we hear you thinking. Well, hold on a second. 

If you’ve only got a little store, using Adobe Commerce will be like buying a chainsaw to prune a rosebush; messy, expensive, unnecessary, and basically just way too much effort. 

If you’re scaling up fast, have hundreds of products, are expanding globally, or have outgrown your current ecommerce solution, then Adobe Commerce could be exactly what you’re looking for.

Small businesses and side hustlers,  turn back now – this isn’t the solution for you. Instead, take a look at platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, or even Wix (if you’re going to have under 10 products). 

What is Adobe Commerce?

Adobe Commerce is the name of the website builder once known as Magento, which was acquired by Adobe in 2018. Adobe Commerce allows you to build, design, publish, and start selling through your own website, without needing to know code.

You can create – and deliver – content and promotions in real time, while providing AI-driven, personalized product recommendations and experiences to your customers. You can also manage multiple websites and brands from a single interface, and deploy hundreds of shop fronts: all while localizing each to the currencies and countries you’re operating in.

Through this lens, Adobe Commerce is about thinking big; it’s looking not only at your website, but the experience you’re offering. It’s about building customized apps, connecting customer experiences across channels, and scaling your online infrastructure to global proportions.

What are Adobe Commerce's Pros and Cons?

Pros:

✔️ Super scalable – All the features and inventory management you need to keep your store looking tight and running smoothly as your product catalog grows from hundreds to thousands. Unlimited attributes mean endless ways for you and your customers to filter and segment.

✔️ Feature-rich – Simply put, it’s unlikely that Adobe Commerce won’t be able to do what you need it to, especially when compared to other ecommerce solutions. Just watch out for what costs extra – and, of course, how much extra!

Cons:

❌ Expensive – As we’ll soon see, Adobe Commerce doesn’t promote its prices transparently on its website. But, given it’s targeted at larger, scaling ecommerce brands, those costs are likely to be hefty. What’s more, its themes are pricey, ranging up to $499 – although there is a free theme available.

❌ Not beginner-friendly – Installing Adobe Commerce, and getting it to look how you want it to look, will be near impossible without some dev work. Setting up shop with no coding knowledge is possible, but it will be one hell of a steep learning curve.

How Easy is Adobe Commerce to Use?

Ease of use is Adobe Commerce’s weakest area, scoring just 2.5 out of 5 in testing. This is the main reason we don’t recommend it for beginners, or small stores.

Once you’ve installed it, the backend is pretty standard, and fairly user-friendly – the key thing to note being “once you’ve installed it”. 

Installing Adobe Commerce (formerly Magento) without any real technical experience is hard. When you compare that with the simple, two minute signup of ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, you can see why Adobe Commerce scores so poorly. Even WooCommerce, another open-source platform, makes life a lot easier, with a lot more hand-holding through the initial stages. 

Alternatively, you can pick a hosting provider that offers pre-configured installation – not many do, but SiteGround does, and it’s our top choice for Adobe Commerce hosting. 

Once you’re over the setup hurdle, though, Adobe Commerce is fairly intuitive. Built to serve stores with 10 or 10,000 products, smaller businesses will of course find some things unnecessarily complicated. If you have a large inventory, though, Adobe Commerce is designed to make everything super simple to input, find, and manage. 

Adding products is a simple, no-frills process, and you can bulk import products using a spreadsheet – a big time saver for adding multiple products. 

But it’s searching for products where Adobe Commerce really proves itself as a scalable platform that makes the lives of shoppers easy. For you, as the store owner, searching for a product in the backend can be done a number of ways.

You can also give your products unlimited attributes, which makes organising thousands of products a whole lot simpler. Add attributes based on size, color, style – basically, anything that makes sense for your brand!

What are Adobe Commerce's Themes and Design Capabilities Like?

To get started with an Adobe Commerce theme, you’ll need to bring one in from the Adobe Commerce Marketplace.

There are 12 themes, but only one of these is free – the rest will cost anywhere between $25 and $499. Or, of course, you can also pick one up on a third-party site, like ThemeForest. Adobe Commerce powers around a fifth of the world’s online stores, so there’s no shortage of creative people churning out new themes. 

So, what’s next? Well, customization beyond the superficial stuff is going to require rooting around in your theme’s CSS – not something we’d recommend for a beginner.

Again, due to its popularity, there’s no shortage of web developers who know their stuff when it comes to Adobe Commerce, and you can expect to pay $400 to $600 to customize a theme to your liking. Of course, you can always get one built from scratch – just expect to pay anything up to $25,000 for the privilege.

How Much Does Adobe Commerce Cost?

Frustratingly, Adobe Commerce doesn’t advertise the costs of its two plans: Adobe Commerce Pro and Managed Services.

When you navigate to its pricing pages, there aren’t any dollar figures or indication of what you’ll pay for either – and clicking the button that says “Get pricing” will only take you to an online form, which will put you through to Adobe Commerce’s sales team to understand the size and unique needs of your business.

This lack of transparency around pricing – despite being a little annoying – isn’t unprecedented or unexpected. It’s a common tactic among enterprise-level solutions (as Adobe Commerce is) where pricing differs vastly based on the circumstances and requirements of the business.

What we can say about Adobe Commerce’s pricing, though, is that – particularly given it’s aimed at larger businesses – it’s expensive.

Estimates from across the web put the cost of maintaining a website on Adobe Commerce at between $50,000 and $500,000 a year, and suggest that the outlay to set up an Adobe Commerce store alone is likely to be between $200,000 and $250,000.

Adobe Commerce doesn’t offer a free trial, but you can request a free demo of the platform when you submit an enquiry to the team. You’ll have to fill out a few details about you, your business, and your requirements first, though.

What are Adobe Commerce's Payment Processing Capabilities Like?

Adobe Commerce supports payment via these five methods: 

• Check/money order
• Cash on delivery
• Bank transfer
• Purchase order
• Zero subtotal checkout (e.g. when an offer code takes the price to zero, but tax still needs to be calculated)

Adobe Commerce comes ready to take payments using the following payment gateways: 

1. Paypal 
2. Authorize.net 

To activate both, you’ll need to add your personal data. 

Of course, you can add many more payment gateways as extensions. These range from free to a few hundred dollars (one off payments) – but remember that you’ll incur different fees depending on the payment processor. Adobe Commerce itself doesn’t take any commission or sales fees. 

Here are just some of the payment gateways you can add as extensions: 

• Stripe 
• Square 
• Amazon Pay 
• Sage Pay 

There are hundreds of payment extensions, and Apple Pay was recently added as a payment method which is now supported by an Adobe Commerce extension. 

What Features Does Adobe Commerce Come With?

Now we’re at the good stuff. Features are what Adobe Commerce does best; however, it’s let down a little because some of the juicier stuff needs adding in via an extension – we’ll get to that a little later on.

But for now, let’s take a look at some of the features that are included with Adobe Commerce – and there are a lot.

Ecommerce/Store Management

• Unlimited product attributes – Endless ways for you (and your customers) to segment and filter your products 
• On-page/guest checkout – Speedy checkout options to make on-the-go customers happy customers 
• Multiple languages and currencies – Adobe Commerce is very much geared up for helping you go global
• Multiple logins, multiple sites – Manage multiple sites in one place, and offer out multiple logins with adjustable permissions
• Sell multiple product types – These product types (including variable, simple, online bookings, etc.) are included for free, whereas on WooCommerce you have to pay extra for some types

Marketing

• Set related products and upsells – Make the most of every sale
• Recently viewed/similar products – Personalize each person’s shopping experience with their own browsing history 
• Coupons – Go coupon crazy, with loads of scope to personalize
• Free Google Analytics integration – Track store performance in real detail
• Abandoned cart emails – Follow up with customers who leave your site without buying the items in their cart

SEO

• Edit URLs and meta information – Make it as easy as possible for Google to find your products 
• Sitemap – You’ll get an auto-generated sitemap for tracking all your content

Anything Missing?

We could talk for a long time about everything Adobe Commerce includes – what we’ve listed above is truly the tip of the iceberg. Adobe Commerce’s features are some of the strongest around.

What might be more useful at this stage is to give you a sense of what’s missing, or what’ll cost you extra. Namely, that’s:

1. Multichannel integration – You can sell across multiple channels from your Adobe Commerce store (Facebook, Etsy, eBay, etc.), but you need to enable this by adding extra extensions, which can be pricey (although some are free): 

• Amazon – $0
• Facebook – $199+
• Instagram – $300+
• eBay – $499+

2. Coupon customization – Coupons and discounts can be customized to be really specific to a date, customer, or product – but doing this then requires some knowledge of coding, which could be a sticking point. 

What Extensions and Add-ons Does Adobe Commerce Offer?

Extensions are one of the real selling points of a software like Adobe Commerce. They’re especially helpful for getting all of your different processes and software synced up and “talking to each other”, cutting unnecessary admin time. 

Extensions fall into six different categories: 

1. Customer support 
2. Payments and security 
3. Marketing 
4. Accounting and Finance 
5. Shipping and Fulfillment 
6. Site Optimization 

Some quick fire facts on the number and cost of extensions: 

• Adobe Commerce’s extensions range from free to $9,000+ (one-off payments)
• Adobe Commerce has 1,970 free extensions 
• 10% of Adobe Commerce extensions cost less than $30

31% of Adobe Commerce extensions cost between $94 and $9,000.

What's Adobe Commerce's Security Functionality Like?

Strong security is important for any website, but when you’re an ecommerce website handling the card details of hundreds of customers, the stakes are a lot higher. 

Security for your Adobe Commerce website comes from two sides: 

1. The Adobe Commerce software itself – built-in security features, and anything you can add with extensions 
2. Your hosting plan – again, here we’ve worked on the assumption that you’re using SiteGround, because this is the hosting provider we’d most recommend for Adobe Commerce sites

Built-in Adobe Commerce Security

Adobe Commerce has excellent security features.

Remember – it’s designed for big businesses dealing with lots of payments, and sports security on a level to match. Two-factor authentication is included as standard, while PCI compliance is handled for you.

Adobe Commerce regularly releases security “patches”, too: updates with the latest versions of all its built-in security measures. You have to take on the responsibility of installing these as soon as they come out to keep your site protected. 

You can put your site through Adobe Commerce’s own security scanner to flag any out-of-date software, or general problem areas.

SiteGround security

SiteGround brings some of its own great security features to the table as well:

• Free SSL certificate – to reassure website visitors that your website is secure
• 24/7 server monitoring – SiteGround keep eyes on your website all day and all night
• Intrusion Prevention System – disables access for any IP address caught trying to bruteforce your passwords

What's Adobe Commerce's Help and Support Like?

The bad news: Help and support is basically not a thing with open-source software like Adobe Commerce. There isn’t a team of people on hand to help you via live chat, email, phone, etc. – instead, you’re reliant on guides on the Adobe Commerce website, and posting in the community forum if you’re stuck.

The good news: Adobe Commerce’s guides are pretty great (well, as good as you’re likely to come across with any open-source software), and there’s a community of people who really know their stuff and are happy to try and answer your questions. Again, this all comes back to Adobe Commerce being so popular.

We love these video format resources, which make any step-by-step processes really easy to understand.

Adobe Commerce Review: Summary

Adobe Commerce is an excellent, powerful ecommerce platform. You’ll want for nothing if you use it. There are just some pretty sizeable hurdles that keep it from being the right choice for everyone:

• Ease of use – Adobe Commerce isn’t very easy to set up or design and it has a steep learning curve, but it’s fairly intuitive to use
• Cost – It’s free to install, but with all the necessary extras, costs will quickly rack up
• Time – The steep learning curve means you’ve got a lot of time to get it right

You should use Adobe Commerce if…

• You have a fast-growing brand that will outgrow – or already has outgrown – popular platforms like Shopify
• You’ll be selling in lots of different countries
• You’re happy to pay for developer work, or are able to do this in-house
• You have a very large catalog with hundreds or thousands of products

You shouldn’t use Adobe Commerce if…

• You’re just starting out (you can always switch to Adobe Commerce a few years down the line if you need to)
• You don’t have any tech resource or the budget to pay for it
• You need a quick or affordable solution

Written By

Rob Binns Senior Writer

Hi, I’m Rob:

Hailing originally from West Yorkshire, but growing up in Wellington, New Zealand, I’ve written for brands and businesses all over the world – empowering everyone from solopreneurs and micro-businesses to enterprises to some of the ecommerce industry’s best-known brands: including Yahoo!, Ecwid, and Entrepreneur.

From foretelling the extinction of the high street ATM to attending PayExpo – Europe’s foremost payments conference – I immersed myself in the payments space, which left me with a love of small businesses that remains strong to this day.

It was that love that took me to Website Builder Expert, where I spent half a wonderful year as Content Manager in 2021. During that time, I researched and wrote a portfolio of articles focusing on the technology small businesses can harness to get online – then make an impact there. 

When I left Website Builder Expert, it was for a new adventure – one that’s taken me all the way Down Under. I’m now based in Melbourne, Australia, where I write freelance content.

Going forward, I’ll continue to bring my passion, profile, and personality to bear on my work here at WBE, and at large. My promise? To always keep the reader – be they an individual, a business, or something else entirely – at the heart of my approach.

You can find me on Linkedin here.Rob spent three years writing, editing, and strategising for renowned B2B comparison site Expert Market. With presences in the UK, USA, Canada, Germany, Australia, and Spain, Rob helped drive a wide range of niche content across industries and sectors. He also researched, ideated, and wrote content unpacking a wealth of technologies: including fleet management software, telephone systems, POS devices, and asset tracking.

Specifically, Rob delved into the payments space – crunching, comparing, and contrasting the range of ways for merchants to take credit and debit card payments. And then sharing this with his business audience – empowering them to sell with greater security, convenience, ease, and affordability.

Rob joined Website Builder Expert in 2021, where he took on the role of Content Manager. Besides testing the platforms we review, Rob also applied his excellent research and writing skills, extensive business knowledge, and general motivational attitude to create articles for the site and lead a team of writers to do the same.

Between dissecting the internet’s best ecommerce platforms to its most effective email marketing tools, Rob was in his element. He also mentored and managed several of WBE’s remarkable team members – helping them build the skills and mentality required to progress, grow, and excel in their roles, and get the best out of their prolific writing talents.

Rob left Website Builder Expert for new adventures across the world in Australia, where he now writes freelance content – continuing to share his expertise for Website Builder Expert’s articles, among other projects!

Rob’s commitment for the future is to empower his audience to make better, more effective decisions: whether that’s helping them pick the right platform to build their website with, the best hosting provider for their needs, or offering recommendations as to what – and how – to sell.

So drop him a line, or check out some of his articles below – and leave a comment there if you like what you see. He looks forward to continuing the conversation!

More about