How to Turn Magento Community Website into a Magento Enterprise Edition Store

Despite Magento Enterprise Edition offers much more opportunities than Community Edition does, you can always make your CE store much more robust. Below, I share my experience in turning a Magento Community website into a Magento Enterprise class ecommerce solution.

First of all, I should tell you about advantages of Magento Enterprise vs. Magento Community. The platform is better optimised for a large number of products. It includes full page cache by default. There are integrated rollback and backup systems in Enterprise Edition. The platform is highly scalable. It has an enhanced tax calculation system out-of-the-box. There is also a faster checkout as well as tons of advanced admin features, such as the ability to easily manage customer attributes. It is also necessary to mention, that a gift wrapping option is built-in to Magento EE. Furthermore, Enterprise Edition offers advanced marketing and segmentation, as well as private sales. PCI compliance; gift registries, points and cards; a return management authorization system; Solr Search; automated emails; multiple custom landing pages; cross-sell, upsell, and recommended Products; customer-assigned shopping; and some other features are included in Magento EE from the beginning. Another important advantage of the platform is a 24/7 developer support. In addition, all patches are pre-installed, which makes your store more secure. Luckily, you can get all  these features within your CE website.

But what are the drawbacks of Enterprise Edition? The platform costs  €12,000 per installation per year, which is too much for small and mid-sized businesses. In fact, Enterprise Edition is nothing more than Community Edition with several additional modules: CE consists of 65 modules, while EE adds 41 more. Note that they can be installed with the help of third party extensions, add bug fixes,or considered to be useless. Probably, you will never need all features exclusively offered by EE, but they are mandatory pre-installed. Enterprise Edition is heavier and slower than Community Edition, as it includes a lot of additional software, which decreases the performance of a website.

If the lack of support in CE seems to be a problem, install paid extensions, and you will not only get the missing features, but also receive support from extension developers, who will help you install, manage, and update purchased modules. Please note that you only have to pay once while in case of EE payments are annual.

The total price of all paid (unfortunately, there are no free alternatives for every module) extensions described below is $722. Since a basic hosting price is $20 a month (https://goo.gl/8NeYTe), and an average price of a good Theme Forest template is $100 (http://goo.gl/AQ14oI ), you can run an eterprise level Magento Community based online website for less that $1000! The detailed description of the missing features and modules developed for their implementation on Magento CE can be found in our Magento DIY Complete Guide. You can see Enterprise specific features on The Harsh Truth of Magento Enterprise presentation by Tim Bezhashvyly:

In the book, I will tell you how to get almost all of them on you Community Edition store for free or for reasonable prices.