eBay Confirms Shutdown of Small-Business E-Commerce Software Products - Magento Go and Prostores

eBay announced on Tuesday that it would be shutting down its Magento Go and ProStores small-business e-commerce products in early 2015. The closure of these offerings, which Re/code first reported last week, will affect about 10,000 small-business customers who used the services to power their online stores, a company exec said.

In an interview, Magento marketing head Craig Peasley said the company is making these cuts to focus on the two Magento e-commerce software products that are having success: Its Magento Enterprise and Community Edition offerings, which target bigger and/or more sophisticated online sellers than Magento Go and ProStores did. Magento previously cut dozens of employees as it realigned its focus. Peasley said the company does not expect further layoffs related to the shutdown of the business.

Small businesses will have until February 1, 2015, to move their online shops to different services.

“We wanted to make sure that customers could plan for it before the holidays,” Peasley said.

eBay has posted a variety of resources online to help their customers decide what to do next. Magento hopes that some will opt to upgrade to its Enterprise or Community Edition products, but if that doesn’t make sense for a business, the company is recommending that customers migrate over to its former competitor Bigcommerce, as Re/code previously reported would be the case.

Peasley said that Magento is recommending Bigcommerce because of its history of successful store migrations from other services as well as its existing integrations with other parts of eBay and PayPal. Bigcommerce President Steven Power said that his company has previously handled the migration from other e-commerce platforms for 12,000 businesses, including 6,000 former ProStores customers.

The deal could be huge for Bigcommerce if it can snag a large portion of the 10,000 affected Magento customers; it currently has about 50,000 clients, Power said. The company, which has raised $75 million in venture capital, is offering special discounts for Magento customers who switch over.