Many B2B companies find their Magento platform feels sluggish, has become complex, or is increasingly costly to maintain. Releases take longer than expected, updates are postponed, and every change feels like a risk.
The gut reaction is often: Should we switch to a different platform?
But that question rarely leads to the right answer. Experiences with Magento often say more about the quality of the implementation and management than about the platform itself.
Why Many Magento Problems Trace Back to Implementation
Magento has been around for a long time. And this long history explains a large part of the problems organizations experience today.
For years, Magento was the only platform for serious webshops. It was used by a wide range of parties: large agencies, smaller agencies, freelancers. This made the platform accessible but also meant that implementation quality varied greatly.
Not every provider had deep Magento expertise or worked with established technical standards. Implementations were often set up just to “work,” not to be sustainable over time. Without structured maintenance agreements, periodic clean-ups, and a clear update strategy, technical debt accrues. Code still functions but isn’t future-proof.
The consequences are often attributed to Magento years later, while in reality they result from choices made during implementation that were never revisited.
Why Magento Is Actually Well-Suited for B2B Companies
The fact that Magento is often considered “difficult” stems from the context in which the platform is used. It rarely runs in simple environments but is instead deployed at B2B organizations with complex client agreements, processes, and backend integrations. When that complexity becomes visible in daily operations, the platform is quickly seen as heavy-weight.
However, Magento is not just a simple sales layer, but a platform designed to support this complexity. Think of customer-specific pricing and catalogs, multiple users and roles per client organization, complex order flows and approval structures, and integrations with ERP, PIM, and logistics systems.
Additionally, for many B2B companies, Magento also makes sense financially. It’s a proprietary digital channel: an asset you invest in, can depreciate, and becomes part of your business operations. With platforms where you don’t own the solution (like Shopify), costs are often tied to transactions or revenue, making growth predictably more expensive. Magento works differently: margins increase as volume grows, without the platform’s costs rising alongside.
Why These Advantages Are Often Not Realized in Practice
The fact these benefits exist doesn’t mean they are automatically realized.
In practice, they disappear as soon as the technical foundation isn’t correctly set up or maintained. Backend integrations become fragile. Performance drops. Small changes become complex and costly. A platform designed to be strategic transforms into a source of frustration.
What’s often missing here is technical ownership, especially by the party responsible for configuration and management. Without clear standards, periodic cleanup, and a structured update approach, a Magento environment slowly falls out of balance, no matter how powerful the platform is at its core.
“Magento Is Slow” Is Usually a Symptom
Sluggishness, instability, and bugs are often seen as evidence that Magento falls short. In reality, these are usually signs of technical debt that has built up over the years.
Updates are postponed to avoid risk, custom code remains because it once worked, and extensions aren’t removed because their impact is unclear. As a result, dependencies within the platform increase. Every change becomes more stressful, each release is more complex. The result feels like a slow system, but the real cause is the lack of structural maintenance and clear technical management.
Where Things Go Wrong: Lack of Direction in Implementation and Maintenance
A recurring pattern among organizations struggling with Magento is the lack of clear structure.
Maintenance, bug fixes, and new functionalities run together. Everything is prioritized equally. Updates compete with features. Stability with innovation. Costs become unpredictable, since every issue becomes a separate project.
When an implementation partner is mainly reacting to tickets and incidents instead of steering toward structural quality, a reactive approach develops. Problems are solved but not prevented, and innovation is pushed further and further to the background.
What Changes When Magento Is Maintained Structurally
Organizations that break through this make one fundamental choice: maintenance is not an ad-hoc activity, but a fixed part of the platform.
Updates follow a routine. Security and stability are ensured. The technical foundation stays manageable. This creates room for further development and optimization, instead of endlessly putting out fires.
The platform becomes what it should be: a stable asset that supports backend processes and grows with the organization, instead of an unpredictable cost driver.
The Problem Isn’t Magento Itself
Magento is technically powerful, financially sound, and process-oriented. But it demands technical discipline, clear choices, and structured management. Without these prerequisites, any platform becomes complex. With them, Magento comes into its own, especially in B2B environments where scalability, margins, and predictability matter.
Doubts about Magento are often based on experiences that say little about the platform itself. The real question isn’t whether Magento is suitable for B2B, but whether the party responsible for implementation and management treats the platform accordingly. Anyone who answers this honestly often comes to a different conclusion than expected.
This is why more and more organizations are choosing to organize maintenance and updates in a structured way instead of ad hoc—for example, through fixed update and maintenance agreements, as with the Magento Total Care Update subscription from Elgentos. This way, the platform remains manageable, predictable, and future-proof.